XP on a netbook - how much space?

grizzed

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 24, 2006
Messages
171
How much space does XP take on the netbooks. A friend of mine was complaining her 8GB SSD only had 1 GB of available space. That didn't sound too bad, but it had me thinking, how small can they go?
 
A base install of XP is really small, less than a gig. The biggest space waster would probably end up being system restore, I'd definitely disable it on a system with limited hard drive space.

8GB is plenty for a simple XP install.
 
Actually a base install of Windows XP SP3 will clock in a little over 2 gigabytes.

You can do some things to save on space like disabling System Restore, turn off hibernation, reduce the size of the page file (not recommended).

What I would recommend is getting your friend an 8GB or 16GB SD card for her netbook. These things are getting cheaper every day ( ~$30-$40 last time I checked on Newegg) and make the ideal secondary storage solution for your typical netbook these days.
 
You can do some things to save on space like disabling System Restore, turn off hibernation, reduce the size of the page file (not recommended).

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I would recommend reducing the size of the page file. Most netbooks have 1 gig of ram. That means windows by default will use a 1.5G page file. I think that's completely unnecessary, especially for something designed for "light computing" like a netbook. I think reducing the page file to like 512MB is a good way to save drive space in this scenario.
 
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