How much partition size for Windows 7?

hi guys..reading the posts here and feel like i gotta try it!

what is the optimal partition size i ll need?

 

if your gonna just test it out 30gb is a nice partition size

 

30 GB or more is recommended, but it is possible to install W7 on a disk that has only 16 GB too (like on some netbooks).

 

That`s good to know, I`ll install it in a few days. Appart from the mp3 patch, is there anything else I need to instal with it ?

 

just run windows update as soon as you install it and your good to go
just make sure you use the latest graphics driver from nvidia/ati or which ever you have.

 

Yeah I used a 30GB partition.

 

I have a 20 GB one and it works well.

 

I have Win7 on an 18 GB partition and it is perfectly happy, even 8 GB in pagefiles/hibernation files. But I install most of my programs to a seperate partition.

The installer told me it needed, IIRC, 8.666 GB of space to install at a minimum when I selected a drive with about 2 GB of space to install it on. Not counting pagefile.sys or hiberfil.sys, my Win7 is using a bit less than 8 GB of space now with most things set up, so 9 GB as an absolute minimum sounds about right.

 

8.666GB! Holy CRAP!

Wow, how things have changed. I think you only need like 500MB min for XP. I know XP is *OLD* by software terms but that's a tremendous amount of files. What could be needed for an _OS_ to take up 9GB!??

 

So if you install things to a separate partition, can you run them from there?

 

Yes, you can. Sometimes you have to select the "Custom install" option to be able to choose where you install to, but almost all programs will work just fine from any install location. There are a few rogue ones (such as AIM) that install to C:\ without asking, though, so leave a bit of space for them.

I'm now of the mind that the amount of space Windows 7 uses actually varies highly between the 32-bit and 64-bit versions. 64-bit, as I mentined earlier, used about 8 GB of space after install and has slowly increased to 8.38 GB at present. However, I just installed 32-bit on a virtual machine, and it uses quite a bit less:



4.78 GB! Memory usage was also much lower - with 1 GB to the VM, it was using nearly exactly 300 MB. Still worse than XP, but very reasonable. This is after disabling the pagefile, and without hibernation, but it does show Win7 operating on less than 5 GB of hard drive space.

32-bit also reported a much lower figure - about 5.55 GB - as the minimum requirement in the installation program. So I'm drawn to the conclusion that Win7 32-bit is much more lean in terms of requirements than Win7 64-bit. Perhaps that's another reason why there's still a 32-bit version of Win7.

Earlier I did some tests of how Win7 fared with various amounts of memory allocated, from 256 MB through 4096 MB. I may repeat these tests with Win7 32-bit, as it already appears to use much less memory. It won't be quite the same considering it's in a VM, but hopefully it'll still prove helpful. It also is a somewhat more attractive prospect since I can keep doing stuff in XP while it restarts rather than not being able to use the computer while timing it. But it'll have to wait for now - I've got my processor heavily limited for battery life, and that has a pretty adverse affect on the Win7 VM performance.

The point of the 32-bit VM, for those interested, was so I could access Win7 while running XP. But I'm interested to see that it has made Microsoft's resource-requirement claims seem much more plausible. And this is the Ultimate version!

edit: I don't know what that floppy drive is doing in Win7. I guess it found the virtual floppy drive in the Sun virtual machine. Good to know that it still has floppy support I suppose.

 

So I have a bunch of programs I installed to my C: drive a while back on Vista, so can I run them while in Windows 7 (I think I can if I understand you correctly) and if I can how do I do it, just with a shortcut or what?

 

No, or at least, probably not. If you install Windows 7, and then install your programs (in Windows 7) to a different partition, you can run them. Example:

You install Windows 7 to C:\. You install your programs to E:\. They'll run fine.

What I think you mean now, is your drives are like this:

C:\ has Vista, and your programs installed.
D:\ has Win7 (although Win7 probably calls this C:\).

You want to try to run your programs that are on C:\ and were installed with Vista on Windows 7 without reinstalling them, right? That will not, generally speaking, work. Pretty much any program that depends on registry settings to run will not work in this manner. However, some programs do work just fine in this fashion. For those programs, you just need to create a shortcut (whether on the desktop or Start menu is up to you) to the .exe file that starts that program.

In my experience about half of programs work correctly in this manner, and they tend to be the ones with less stringent registration and DRM (but not always). Which ones of yours will work without reinstallation you'll just have to find out by trial and error. It can be a nice space saver, though.

 

I've always heard that anything between 25-30 should suffice.

 

Yup I suggest 30GB or more thats if your going to test it out, if your going to use it as a primary then definitely more than that.

 

I installed my W7 on 14.5 GB test partition, because 12GB were recommended. However, W7 actually takes less than 6 GB. It's a few yrs old pre-vista centrino laptop.

 

So how is this supposed to be friendly to netbooks? I thought part of W7 was to reduce total file size, and be friendly to netbooks?

 

Some clever ppl r Vliting W7 for their netbooks:
http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=57434

 

Thanks for the link! But my point was I thought out of the box it was supposed to be netbook friendly, and having an 8GB footprint isn't.

 

Well who knows how much space the netbook version of W7 will take up. We're all reporting W7 Ultimate sizes.

 

Well, considering how much SSD's are falling in price, if it can fit in 16 GB well (which it can), that may be good enough.

And Matt does have a good point - although there is no "netbook edition", Home Premium and Starter (and Home Basic, which I do believe they decided to keep around on limited terms) probably won't use as much space, though who knows what the difference will be. 32-bit versions also seem to save space.

 

Apologies to anyone I offended: I'll try to be more constructive in future.

Apparently opinions are banned: I'll stick to facts then.

Cheers, Mark

 

Opinions aren't banned here, but you join a thread discussing Windows 7 and all you can do is blame MS for the ever increasing size and complexity of the the O/S, and, that is functionality that is wanted and needed by all of its core users?

That doesn't sound merely like an opinion to me?

Glad to see your attitude has changed though. Looking forward to see your contribution to this fine forum.

Cheers!

 

The explanation for this, at least disc space, for those interested: Because there are 2 versions, 32 and 64 bit, of most core Windows utilities installed (IE8, WMP, etc.) Therefore, more disc space.

We'll have 32 bit Windows os's as long as there are 32 bit-only processors (Atoms) coming down the lines...