Just enough for my drivers and my windows XP setup will be more than enough. I will work from another partition and the system partition will be frozen. 2Gb seem right but was using 5-10 Gb before, how much do I really need? I'm now checking with VirtualBox If it's enough, I have access legaly to my school license. It used 1.11Gb on 2Gb with a windows xp professionnal cd (oem, retail, msdn.) I know about Nlite but if you're not careful you will lose some stuffs that you need, but I was mostly asking for the default install size to use as a rule of thumb. This is just a possible solution to make the XP Install take up less space.

• Smallest Windows 7 Iso

Have you ever heard of Basically, it allows you to add/remove components to a Windows XP installation (e.g. Drivers, applications, services), and create an unattended install if desired. I always remove the stuff I don't need from Windows (e.g. Firewall, defender, wireless services, indexing) to save space and increase performance (also, there's no point on keeping the Microsoft versions of software if you replace them with something else anyways). I created one version for a Virtual PC, so I basically ripped everything out of it, and got the final install size to under 300mb (and if I compressed the image with WinRAR, the virtual hard disc shrank to 165mb - the same size as the ISO). On my normal XP disc, which retains most functionality (including wireless), the install was about 400 to 500mb ( without a pagefile!).

A lot of stuff is done on the partition that Windows is on (think temporary files from all types of files). I once ran out of space while trying to extract a large set of files from an archive, even though I wasn't extracting to the partition Windows was on (but the unarchiver was saving some temporary files there).

Also, a few programs, although installed on a different partition, copy some files to C: Program Files Common Files (that folder is taking up nearly 650 MB on my PC). On top of the minimum 4 GB everybody is recommending, I suggest you leave a little bit more, just in case (about 1GB should be enough); it never hurts to have a bit of breathing room:).

I don't recommend doing bare minimum installs in bare minimum spaces. That said, one trick to installing in less space is to install with MINIMAL RAM. Windows will create a pagefile that is 1.5x RAM. So if you allocate 1 GB of RAM, then you need an extra 1.5 GB for the pagefile.

If you use a pagefile that's too small, you'll get low virtual memory messages and possible cause the system to be unstable - but in terms of initial install, you can set the RAM to 128 MB (in a virtual machine) and then do the install. This will mean that you get a 192 MB pagefile and reduce the initial disk space required. Update: if you streamline the service pack 3, and remove things like media player, internet explorer (you will download firefox anyway), etc. It installs at 1.45GB.

Smallest Windows 7 Iso

(more than windows xp SP2 including media center and IE) to make a small installer you need to use which is free-ware. The process of removing unneeded portions of windows is painful, but you can remove a Gb from the final install (and 300mb from the installation disk!). Here is the preset i use so you don't have to read all the thousands of options on nlite: (import as a preset on nlite).