Hey guys,

I apologize for asking a Winblows question on LQ but...what can I do, this is my home

I was gonna repartition my XP box today to install _________ (I am still not sure wich distro, candidates are: FreeBSD, Fedora, Suse: I want something mainstream, but not too watered down; still taking sugestions)

I was surprised to find my XP taking 20GB of space. Should the install be that large? All of my files I managed to backup on a single 650MB CD, so that's not what's taking space. Is it because I've had Restore on all the time, and now I have all my system files double and triple installed? If that's the case, how can I get rid of it?

Thanks.

System restore can take up space, but so can programs and system files and so forth.

For a rough breakdown of common situations I see at work:

• XP With Patches: ~2 GB
• MS Office: ~4 GB
• System restore: ~3 GB

Then add between 200 and 750 MB per title for most common (non-trivial) software. Add substantially more for photo or video editing software.

If all your personal files are less than 650 MB, then 20GB does seem a bit excessive. Using windows explorer, browse to C:\Documents and Settings\. Right click on your user and check properties. See how much your personal files really consume.

Moved: This thread is more suitable in General (home of Windows-specific questions) and has been moved accordingly to help your thread/question get the exposure it deserves.

a fully patched base install of XP (home or Pro should not make a huge differance) with MS Office 2000 (sorry cant help ya with newer vs of office) will take between 3-6G worth of space.

that will depend on if you use SP2 right off the bat, or stick with SP1a and run all of the extra patches requried by SP1a.

If you plan on say 10G worth of space you will have a little room to put a game or 2 and maybe a few other apps. My last dual boot i gave XP Pro 25G IIRC because i would be playing World of Warcraft (4G just for base install on that game) and would also be running a few other apps like PageMaker and QuickBooks along with OpenOffice. (way smaller then MS Office)

(Never thought I'd see the day I attempted to give windows advice on LQ )

Have you run the 'disk cleanup' lately? If not, try that then take another look at how much disk space is being used.

The PC my family uses for homework, surfing etc has XP Pro. If I don't run cleanup often, it fills itself up with tons of temp files, cookies, and so on.

BTW, I like Debian and Slackware (and Mepis and Vector, but that seems repetitive.)

You see, if the hard drive is completely full with every web page you will never ever visit again.... it will be very microsoftesque.

Thanks everyone. I figured out yesterday what was causing those 20Gigs. Really stupid thing, (I am going back to my old rule of waiting a day before I post anything here just so I don't embarass myself anymore). First, my system restore was taking about 4G, so I shut that down. Than I followed Matir's sugestions and checked my user folder. That's when I figured that I had couple of downloaded disttro CD images sitting in the 'download' folder on my desktop.
What can I say:

Yeah, ISOs can be big. Case in point: