Windows Growth

I find it a little unbelievable how Windows has grown over the years.

When I first started with XP, I had a 20 GB hard drive that was split in two: 10GB for XP, 10 GB for linux. And that did fine, with Office, a couple of browsers, plus the associated other windows tools I used.

Up until today I've been using this logic in having a reference XP VM, which I clone for individual customer and one-off purposes. That VM has an 8GB drive so that it had space to do things and wasn't so big that I couldn't have a bunch of them on my laptop.

Today I can't squeeze Office into one of these VMs. Look at this SequoiaView:

What it is showing you is that the C:\Windows directory on this VM is 5.2 GB.

C:\Program Files is less than 1GB.

Now there is history to this VM. It has had SP3 applied to it, plus numerous security fixes. Office 2k3 has been installed and removed. However there isn't really much of anything left installed. Just Java and a few browser plugins.

It is insane that this is the minimum footprint of windows these days.

I've been watching the prices of flash drives fall even as the available sizes increase. Today you can buy a 16GB flash drive for what, $75? Less if you shop around. I was hoping to buy a couple to put VMs on, meaning that between them and a SSD I wouldn't have to worry about having a real hard disk in the new laptop. Just a SSD for the basic stuff, then flash drives for individual VMs. Perfect.

However this growth means I'll probably have to start running 20GB VMs, which means I'm back waiting for the next growth generation of flash drives before I can ditch the hard disk entirely.