How much space does Windows XP take up?

Food?

I'm re-doing the Boot Camp partition on my mac, and I want to give Windows as little HD space as possible (I have an external HD for storage). What's a good amount?

stigweard

My windows folder alone sits at 3.75GB. I'm sure if I deleted all the restore folders and temp files, I could shirnk it down a decent amount, but I'd still leave ~6-8GB for a partition to include basic installed apps like office, etc...

You have to consider the pagefile too, that will need to be at least as large as the amount of ram you have.

Food?

So 10 GB should be about right?

matt has a problem

You can put it down to 5 gigs, but that's pushing it, especially once you add SP2 and all the Windows Update stuff, plus files that programs have to install in the Windows directory. I've had Windows install going for a year since last reinstalling it, and with everything I've installed since then it's taking up just under 6 gigs. 10 gigs leaves you plenty of breathing room, 7 is about the minimum I'd go.

Food?

10 it is then, thanks dudes.

Clipse

I've installed Windows XP + SP2 on a laptop with a 6GB hard drive and had space (just a little) to spare, so a 6GB partition should do it. However, more might leave room for a larger page file, which is nice.

Marty81

I'm sure it's well-known but also: disable hibernation (to get rid of hiberfil.sys) to save yourself a lot of room.