Minimum disk space for Windows 7/VS2010/Expression 3 etc

Question

I'm about to boot camp my at home PC (a Mac, if not obvious) with the intention of only doing some .NET development on it. I have about 60GB to work with, so only want enough room for the Windows install, Visual Studio and any other related libraries and apps.

Does anybody have any estimates on the total footprint needed? I will only be saving code and maybe some images so I would probably budget just 5GB above whatever footprint is minimum. I have an MSDN subscription, so if there's a big advantage to installing a specific Windows iteration (Home/Ultimate or whatnot) I could take that into consideration.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Based on my VS2008 installation (which comes in at 2.94 GMB) and Expression 3 (at 476 MB) with Windows XP (14.9 GB) & assuming that VS2010 and Windows 7 are going to take up more space, it looks like you're going to need at least 25 GB for the basic set up.

There are a number of other folders that get created - Microsoft SDKs (780 MB) for example which will push the total up higher.

Someone else will no doubt provide the exact size of a Windows 7 installation, but when I ran the update advisor it stated that I needed 16 GB of free space to install Windows 7,

Taking all this into account it looks like you'll need a high proportion of your 60 GB.

If you have the MSDN subscription I'd go for one of the high end Windows 7 installations.

Answer 2

I installed Windows 7 Professional x64 on Boot Camp and the new installation took about 15GB. A complete installation of Visual studios 2008 runs about 4GB. A 32 bit version of windows 7 would take about 5-7GB. I'd say a good 25-30GB would be good enough.