How large is the Win7 operating system?

17,602

Solution 1

I'd like to know how large Windows 7 is

The iso is about 4.7GB.

After installing it to disk and running windows updates it occupies about 20GB. (Measured with win7 X64 ultimate, which I installed to a 76GiB SSD. After installing windows, drivers and updates I had about 54GiB diskspace left).

Over time the diskspace needed will grow. Partially due to new updates. Partially from leftovers from installing or deinstalling programs.

This is how my current win7 install looks after about 5 years.

Win7 diskspace usage after 7 years

That particular screenshot is win 7 x64. Installed summer 2009 (so 5 years old of accumulated crud), with a few programs.

(OpenOffice 4.0, Firefox, putty, nmap, CPU-Z, GPU-Z, coretemp, a PDF reader, java, Opera, notepad++, VLC, Bookworm Adventures Deluxe, Kerbal space program, secunia PSI, SysINternal RAMmap, steam client (the steam games are on another volume), OWASP ZAP, teamviewer, a PDF printer and thunderbird).

That is about 30GB after 5 years. So any disk (real or virtual) of at least 40GB will do.

Solution 2

When installing windows 7 on my small revodrive (46GB) windows 7 takes up 28GB of that leaving 18GB free. After turning off pagefile there is 28GB free

This is a fresh clean install (which I did last night) So for me windows 7 size is 18GB

Solution 3

You do not say why you want that information, I'm assuming you want to know how large a (virtual) disk should be to fit your installation.

For all practical purposes you should assume 20-30 GB for an initial installation, but this will increase to about 50 GB when you have collected updates for a few years. That's not just the OS updates (you could delete their backup files), but also keeping copies of updated DLLs and Microsoft libraries (these are kept in the WinSxs directory).

(I already ran out of size on a 40 GB VMWare virtual disk last week, but that contained programs as well, so that needs more space than just the OS).

FWIW: At the end of its life, Windows XP had grown to about 20 GB.

17,602

Lou

I'm a SE user from England. That's about all you need to know.

Updated on September 18, 2022

Comments

Lou over 1 year

I'd like to know how large Windows 7 is, but I'm not sure where to look, and haven't found any information through Google. Is it possible to know this information about an operating system?
Prasanna almost 10 years

Mine is roughly 28 GB.... (27.8GB)
Lou almost 10 years

Mine's 20.7 GB.
Lou almost 10 years

Mine must have a lot of crap!
Daniel B almost 10 years

Many programs depend on various versions of Microsoft libraries. These are all installed side-by-side in the WinSxs directory, causing the Windows directory to grow to insane sizes.
Jan Doggen almost 10 years

This severely underestimates the size. There's user directories, updates etc. The user does not say why he wants that information, but probably because he wwants to know how large a (virtual) disk should be to fit his installation.
David Marshall almost 10 years

This is not an accurate way to get disk usage. Only the files the user has permission to access will be included and hard-linked files will be double counted.
Lou almost 10 years

Oh no, you're overcomplicating it. I'm just curious as to how much space Windows takes up :).
ganesh almost 10 years

That is about the same size I measured (I had 20GB, but that was including drivers. Some of which are quite large).
Prasanna almost 10 years

The C:\ drive which you have pointed to includes the desktop files + My documents + Users folder and many other things.... Right?
Prasanna almost 10 years

If this is not the accurate way - then what is the way to find out?
ganesh almost 10 years

I disabled hibernate and I have 16384KB of pagefile (and 18GB RAM, most of which is usually empty unless I am playing with VMs. In that case I do tend to run out of memory.)
ganesh almost 10 years

I can answer the first part: It is not the accurate way since NTFS is capable of hardlinks. To explain these create a test file, say my_movie, then copy it with mklink /h some_other_name my_movie. It will now have two directory entries for movies but only use one movie worth of diskspace. Sadly MS windows explorer is not fully able to parse the default filesystem from MS, it will report twice the disk space used. (shame on you MS. Many things are great, but you dropped the ball on this one).
David Marshall almost 10 years

@Prasanna On Windows 7 and 8 there isn't an easy way - blogs.technet.com/b/askcore/archive/2013/03/01/… . On Windows 8.1 use fsutil volume allocationreport C: - blogs.msdn.com/b/ntdebugging/archive/2014/05/08/… .
David Marshall almost 10 years

Size of WinSxS folder - technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn251566.aspx