How much HD space does Vista take up?

As the title says, I'm curious as to how much HD space a clean Vista install takes up. This is before ANYTHING but Vista is installed on the computer. Just curious.

Thanks!

*Edit: By Vista, I mean the Ultimate edition, if that makes any difference.

 

15 GB

according to MS.

 

Yeah, it's about 15gb. It's way too much.

 

so is vista on a dual layer dvd 8.6gb compressed?

regards.

John.

 

I could see how it would be a problem on say... a 40/60GB HDD, but since most of today's computers are being sold with 80/100/120/160+GB HDD, I don't think it's much of a problem.

 

espcially on the desktop

yup, Its on a DVD

 

15 GB is minimum amount of free space required by Vista's installer. That's deifferent than how much space the final install takes up.

Realize that the DVD install disc for 32-bit is around 2.8 GB and the 64-bit DVD disc is around 3.5 GB -- nowhere near 15 GB (and they include something like 1200 MB of driver files that don't get installed, plus videos and other media). Once installed, the core Vista files take up a little over 6 GB (plus space for the swap file).

The additional space requirement is due to the way Vista installs (by copying an image over to your hard drive, and then extracting the image). Once installed, you get that space back.

 

Vista needs alot of space when installing. Up to 11gb i heared. But after install is done my Vista Business uses 5.8GB. That is the size of my windows folder. There was an artical about this on the german version of THG.
Link to article Festplatte is the Space used on the Disk after a clean install. Windows Verzeichnis is the size of the windows folder. It is for the German version which might have have extra language files but wont matter too much.

 

My HD is 100 gb. My installed programs total 1.7 gb (MS Office 2003, Adobe reader etc). But my C drive only shows 25 gb left of a total of 67 gb!!!! So would that mean that of the 100 gb, 23 gb was used up by Windows VIsta Ultimate????? Also, my total installed programs is 1.7 gb but I only hav 25 gb left of the 67 gb of my HD. What gives???

 

your computer might have a hidden recovery partition...and it's advertised as a 100gb, but in reality its not 100gb, it's less....my "250gb" hdd really only has a formatted capacity of 232gb.

 

the "windows" folder in a new installed system should be about 7-8GB,
page file is about 1.5 times of your ram,
hibernation file is the same size as your ram,
some vista build-in software, like sidebar, windows calendar, etc, should take at least 500 MB

I have 2GB ram, so my fresh installed vista is about 12 GB (7GB+3GB+2GB)

 

because the ADs calculate 1GB as 1000MB, 1MB as 1000KB, 1KB as 1000B
but the computers calculate 1GB as 1024 MB, 1MB as 1024KB, 1KB as 1024B

 

i also think it is between 15-20 gb

 

The difference is that hard drive manufacturers use 10^9 (decimal), or one billion bytes, as a "gigabyte", while Windows calculates a gigabyte as 2^30 bytes (binary).

2^30 is being called a "gibibyte" to avoid confusion with the decimal "gigabyte"; however, gigabyte is often used to mean one or the other.

 

When partitioning hard drives for Vista Ultimate 32-bit I make the c:\ 30GB. My desktop pc sits at about 20GB of used space, this is with office 2007 installed as well as Vista.... the rest of my programs are installed on the second partition.

10Gb is a nice amount of head room to allow for future service packs and easy defragmentation.

Note I have also resized the system restore to 2GB (I think - as at work now and can't check).

If you are using system restore with its default settings then 30Gb might get a lot tighter in a few months as by default system restore grabs 15% of available HDD space which would be 4.5GB on a 30GB partition.

You can move the page file to another partition but its best to keep it on C:\ as that will be the fastest part of the HDD.

 

My 'windows' folder in C: is 18.3 GB big. ~ Currently using Windows Vista Ultimate x64.

 

well you have alot to consider also you depending on your hard drive size.
100gb
1.format will take off about -7gb
=93gb
2.vista installtion -15gb
=88gb
3.system restore 10% -10gb
=78
4.virtual memory your ram -?
=?gb

after that i dont know what else took vista

 

sorry for double post but my windows files is 14.0 gb under vista home premuim x64
edit: with sp1

 

What do you mean by that ? Formatting reduces hard disk space ?

 

well when you format your hard drive to ntfs it takes some hard drive space. like my 2gb sd card after format reads as 1.89 gb my 200 gb hard drive reads as 185gb and so does everyone else . check your hard capacity and how your suppose to have

 

Well, you no longer have your previous shadow copies, restore points, temp files, hibernation files, etc that were on there previously. Of course, those things come back and start to eat away at your hard drive space which is why you constantly have people asking "Why is my free space shrinking???". However, initially they are not there.

See Where's All My Disk Space Going? (Vista)