What is the average disk space used by Windows XP? [closed]

Question

Does anyone know what the rough usage of hard drive space taken up by a fairly bare-bones Windows XP install is?

I have an old laptop that I'm going to set up to dual-boot XP and a Linux distro. There's only 80gb on the harddrive, and I'm working out how to dish up the partitions. Linux will be the primary OS and will get the lion's share. For XP, I just want enough space to install the OS, maybe Word and Powerpoint from the Office suite, and a bit of space for files so my girlfriend can still use it when necessary.

When I used XP myself in VirtualBox, I seemed to quickly fill up 20gb with just installing XP Service Pack 2 and Office. I didn't expect that much to be used (and had to resize my VirtualBox harddrive as a result....), but does 20gb seem about normal and a reasonable amount for the XP partition? Maybe 25gb?

Answer 1

According to Microsoft, you need:

At least 1.5 GB of available space on the hard disk*
(*) Actual requirements will vary based on your system configuration and the applications and features you choose to install. Additional available hard disk space may be required if you are installing over a network.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314865

You should add 1 GB for the updates and Word & Powerpoint and other programs you may need. 20 GB in total is pretty enough.

Answer 2

I have XP installed on my Asus Eee 701 with 4GB. Minimal apps (firefox, skype) and have about 1.5 GB free.

I also have XP installed on an old ThinkPad with a 6 GB drive (yes, 6) and still have tons of space left.

Both are running XP Pro SP3.

Answer 3

A fully-fledged Windows XP installation consumes ~1.4 GB disk space, excluding pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys.

However, you can 'customize' the Windows installation with nLite (or XPLite) and remove unnecessary/unwanted components. Depending on your needs this can yield a dramatic reduction in disk space consumption.