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I currently have Windows 7 Home Premium installed on my laptop, and I am looking to upgrade to Windows 7 Professional. I am looking to install the full version of Windows 7 Professional - not an upgrade version.

Could somebody tell me how large Windows 7 Home Premium and Windows 7 Professional are/how much disk space they consume respectively?

Thank you.

UPDATE: I currently have the 64-bit version of Windows 7 Home Premium and that I wish to install/upgrade to Windows 7 Professional 64-bit.

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You do understand the installation will be exactly the same right? You can do a digital upgrade and Windows will unlocked any features you don't already have, automatically there isn't a need to reinstall the operating system. – Ramhound Sep 8 '11 at 14:32
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On my first Windows 7 Home Premium installation I used a 15GiB partition for the OS. This is definitely too small! I kept it working for a while, but it complained about the space regularly. My current C:\Windows folder is 27.5GiB - big for Windows 7 Professional.

So I would advise for at least 50GiB of disk space, especially if your User files will be on the same partition.

edit:

  • I only used the 64-bit version.
  • I'm not talking about a fresh clean installation here. You get by with 10-15GiB for a while, but as time goes by the system will take up more space.
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The size difference is because your original installation was 32-bit. See David's answer for the reason I say this. – Ramhound Sep 8 '11 at 14:33
No it wasn't. The difference comes from: 1st: the time the system is installed now, because it just grows over time 2nd: the hard limitation of partition with a fixed size (since the system just couldn't grow it had to avoid some growth, delete unused files or force me to do so) – Nornagest Sep 8 '11 at 14:39
The size problem is from winsxs (windows side by side) and the number of programs installed. It is not unusual to have windows 7 report 10GB or more in the winsxs folder. I too, would not install windows on a partition smaller than 50gb (note that winsxs only LOOKS like it takes taht much space because of hard links, but it is still unavailable because explorer doesn't know the difference) – horatio Sep 8 '11 at 15:01
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up vote 3 down vote

Microsoft groups all Windows 7 versions together on their page regarding minimum system requirements for Windows 7. The following is a quote about hard drive space requirements.

16 GB available hard disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)

This wiki page also agrees with Microsoft's page.

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A clean install of 32 Bit Windows 7 Home Premium takes ~6.00GB*. This will increase rapidly with updates and pagefile expansions, so I would think a typical install of Windows 7 alone is around 20GB. Plus you add to that with documents, programms, temp data, and it all starts adding up.

A clean install of 32 Bit Windows 7 Home Premium takes ~6.02GB*.

64-Bit may make a slighty bigger difference.

*Clean install on a VirtualBox VM.

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