I'd like to know how large Windows 7 is, but I'm not sure where to look, and haven't found any information through Google. Is it possible to know this information about an operating system?
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When installing windows 7 on my small revodrive (46GB) windows 7 takes up 28GB of that leaving 18GB free. After turning off pagefile there is 28GB free
This is a fresh clean install (which I did last night) So for me windows 7 size is 18GB
Wuebit
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1That is about the same size I measured (I had 20GB, but that was including drivers. Some of which are quite large). – Hennes Jul 27 '14 at 14:30
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1There's also the hiberfile – hjpotter92 Jul 27 '14 at 14:49
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I disabled hibernate and I have 16384KB of pagefile (and 18GB RAM, most of which is usually empty unless I am playing with VMs. In that case I do tend to run out of memory.) – Hennes Jul 27 '14 at 17:20
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You do not say why you want that information, I'm assuming you want to know how large a (virtual) disk should be to fit your installation.
For all practical purposes you should assume 20-30 GB for an initial installation, but this will increase to about 50 GB when you have collected updates for a few years. That's not just the OS updates (you could delete their backup files), but also keeping copies of updated DLLs and Microsoft libraries (these are kept in the WinSxs directory).
(I already ran out of size on a 40 GB VMWare virtual disk last week, but that contained programs as well, so that needs more space than just the OS).
FWIW: At the end of its life, Windows XP had grown to about 20 GB.
Jan Doggen
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Oh no, you're overcomplicating it. I'm just curious as to how much space Windows takes up :). – Lou Jul 27 '14 at 13:02
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I'd like to know how large Windows 7 is
The iso is about 4.7GB.
After installing it to disk and running windows updates it occupies about 20GB. (Measured with win7 X64 ultimate, which I installed to a 76GiB SSD. After installing windows, drivers and updates I had about 54GiB diskspace left).
Over time the diskspace needed will grow. Partially due to new updates. Partially from leftovers from installing or deinstalling programs.
This is how my current win7 install looks after about 5 years.
That particular screenshot is win 7 x64. Installed summer 2009 (so 5 years old of accumulated crud), with a few programs.
(OpenOffice 4.0, Firefox, putty, nmap, CPU-Z, GPU-Z, coretemp, a PDF reader, java, Opera, notepad++, VLC, Bookworm Adventures Deluxe, Kerbal space program, secunia PSI, SysINternal RAMmap, steam client (the steam games are on another volume), OWASP ZAP, teamviewer, a PDF printer and thunderbird).
That is about 30GB after 5 years. So any disk (real or virtual) of at least 40GB will do.
Hennes
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The C:\ drive which you have pointed to includes the desktop files + My documents + Users folder and many other things.... Right? – Prasanna Jul 27 '14 at 16:47
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Yes, most of those. My profile in c:\users\hennes\ is 4.36GB. The desktop folder in that currently is 508MB. [My Documents] is moved to `D:`. I have no hibernate folder (`powercfg -h off`) and only a small pagefile. These setting were changed because I got enough memory (18GiB) and I did not want to write to my SSD which has no TRIM enabled. (The SSD is connected a JBOD to a HW RAID card and thus I sadly lack TRIM). – Hennes Jul 27 '14 at 17:17
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My answer at Windows 8 disk space usage vs Windows 7 is a comparison between Windows 8 and Windows 7 after clean installs, which shows Windows 7 to be about 8.2 GB
Graham Wager
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Many programs depend on various versions of Microsoft libraries. These are all installed side-by-side in the `WinSxs` directory, causing the Windows directory to grow to insane sizes. – Daniel B Jul 27 '14 at 09:24
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Right click on the Windows folder in the root of your C: drive and choose Properties. That will tell you how much space is currently being used by your Windows installation. That size is separate from your installed programs which are usually in C:\Program Files (x86) and C:\Program Files.
headkase
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This severely underestimates the size. There's user directories, updates etc. The user does not say why he wants that information, but probably because he wwants to know how large a (virtual) disk should be to fit his installation. – Jan Doggen Jul 27 '14 at 10:06
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2This is not an accurate way to get disk usage. Only the files the user has permission to access will be included and hard-linked files will be double counted. – David Marshall Jul 27 '14 at 10:23
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I can answer the first part: It is not the accurate way since NTFS is capable of hardlinks. To explain these create a test file, say `my_movie`, then copy it with `mklink /h some_other_name my_movie`. It will now have two directory entries for movies but only use one movie worth of diskspace. Sadly MS windows explorer is not fully able to parse the default filesystem from MS, it will report twice the disk space used. (shame on you MS. Many things are great, but you dropped the ball on this one). – Hennes Jul 27 '14 at 17:28
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Helpful links: [Wikipedia on hard link](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_link) [MS on hards links and junctions](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/windows/desktop/aa365006%28v=vs.85%29.aspx) – Hennes Jul 27 '14 at 17:30
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@Prasanna On Windows 7 and 8 there isn't an easy way - http://blogs.technet.com/b/askcore/archive/2013/03/01/where-did-my-space-go.aspx . On Windows 8.1 use fsutil volume allocationreport C: - http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ntdebugging/archive/2014/05/08/ntfs-misreports-free-space-part-3.aspx . – David Marshall Jul 27 '14 at 17:31
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Size of WinSxS folder - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn251566.aspx – David Marshall Jul 27 '14 at 17:41