I have a test computer with several hard drives in it, each with a different operating system. When I need to test a new software program or hardware peripheral, I can quickly assess its compatibility across several platforms with this computer. The hard drives are a mix between Western Digital Raptor 36GB and Seagate Barracuda SATA-V 160GB models -- fairly new, fairly fast, and presumably spacious enough for my test OSes. It did not occur to me that I might ever run out of space on the 36GB drives because there is very little "real life" data on it -- just a few megabytes worth of documents, pictures, and other test data. Since switching to Linux and BSD, I have come to think of personal data as being the big storage sink, with the operating system and desktop software being the minimal part of the hard drive's space. Well, that doesn't hold true in Windows Vista. I made the mistake of putting 64-bit Vista on one of the Raptor drives, and after a little over a month of sporadic, short-term use, I'm out of free space. This, to me, is astonishing. How is all that space being used?
First of all, a drive labeled as 36GB is certainly going to be less than that due to addressing, partitioning, and bad sector elimination. When it's all said and done with Windows Vista's NTFS, I end up with 33GB. So there's 3GB out the window right then and there. Vista's Disk Properties dialogue indicated that more than 31GB of that space was occupied in some way.
There is almost no data to speak of on the Vista drive -- a few browser bookmarks, a few small graphic files that I used for testing in Photoshop and Fireworks, and a half dozen screen shots from other programs I've tested recently. Far, far less than 1GB -- probably less than 10MB altogether. So the first thing I did to see what was taking up so much space was look at the Programs and Features section of the Control Panel, which shows how much space each installed program is occupying.
Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium doesn't say how much space it takes up, but if the size of its directory in C:\Program Files\Adobe is any indication, it's about 3GB. That's about what I'd expect it to be, considering the number of programs included in the suite. Microsoft Office Professional 2007, by contrast, is a mere 500MB. Roxio Easy Media Creator 10 Suite takes up a surprising 590MB, but it's even more hefty when you fold in the ancillary Roxio programs and packages that are installed separately from the suite. Add up all of Roxio's applications and you have about 735MB. The separate content package for Easy Media Creator is by itself more than 800MB. World of Warcraft is about 5.5GB. Then there are about a half dozen other programs like the Flash Player and the Firefox Web browser and other little extras that add up to less than 1GB.
So there was no "smoking gun" in terms of huge programs taking up a lot of space. Even added together, they don't amount to an unreasonable portion of the 33GB drive. What about Windows Vista components? Surely there's something like IIS or MSSQL installed that I do not need. But when I clicked on "Turn Windows features on or off" I found that I only had the bare minimum installed in Windows Vista Ultimate. No indexing service, ActiveX installer, extra network services, or anything else that I could reasonably do without. In terms of checkboxes in the list, I had 7 of 23 selected, and two more partially selected.
The next step was to take a look at the file system and see if I could get a better picture of where all the space was going. The Windows directory itself was 11.5GB, which to me is unbelievably large for an OS, not including the applications. Compare that to FreeBSD, which is an entire operating system with lots of extras and has no trouble fitting on a single CD; or Ubuntu Linux, which fits an entire graphical operating environment with desktop applications onto a single 700MB CD.
C:\Program Files, including both the 32- and 64-bit directories, weighed in at 12GB. So MS Office, Adobe Creative Suite, Roxio Easy Media Creator, World of Warcraft, and a handful of other desktop programs take up roughly the same amount of space as the platform they run on. Again, I'm shocked at the sheer size of Windows Vista, which I must remind you is merely an environment for running the aforementioned desktop applications.
So I had less than 2GB of free space, but something didn't quite add up -- literally. If I turned on the option to show hidden files and folders, then selected everything in the C:\ directory, then looked at the group's properties, I only came up with 25GB. So if Explorer said I was using more than 31GB, but I only had enough files for 25GB, where is the missing ~6GB? Is it possible that Vista actually has a 6GB swap file someplace hidden beyond what Explorer can see? That would be ridiculous, but so is an operating system that occupies almost 12GB by itself.
Putting aside the missing 6GB for a moment, I decided to run the built-in Disk Cleanup function to see if there were any unnecessary files I was unaware of. I know that I have personally deleted installation files that I've downloaded, that the Recycle Bin is perpetually empty, and that I hadn't done enough Web browsing on this operating system to accrue a significant number of Web cache files. Incredibly, though, there were 3.59GB worth of files to clean out of Windows Vista -- files I never had any control over or purpose for. 8MB of thumbnail images, 1.27GB "temporary files" (whatever those are), 292MB under various categories related to something called "Windows Error Reporting and Solution Checking," and 2GB wasted on something known as "Hibernation File Cleaner." I have no idea what these things are -- I mean, I have some good guesses, but how would I find out for sure? -- and I was not aware that I was doing anything that would cause all of this cruft to build up over the scant few hours (over the course of several weeks) this operating system has actually been used since I installed it.
After Disk Cleanup was over, I re-checked the difference between what all of the files and folders reported and what Disk Properties showed in terms of occupied drive space. This time it was 24.6GB in the file view, and 29GB in the Properties dialogue. So my 6GB deficit was reduced to 4.4GB, which is still an unacceptable amount of "missing" space as far as I'm concerned.
Hopping over to my Mandriva 2007 Spring AMD64 workstation, df -h shows that all of my installed software (a lot!)plus the operating system adds up to 19GB, and personal data (including a few VMware images, World of Warcraft, and tons of pictures, project files, Web site code, and some unedited home videos that I haven't gotten around to editing and compressing) is around 53GB. The size of the data will remain consistent across platforms, though -- it's the same on Linux as it is on BSD or Windows. One way or the other, there is no way all of this would fit on a 36GB drive. But if I needed to do software testing with very little data and a lot of programs, with Linux, BSD, or Windows 2000 or XP (my entire gigantic WinXP stack, including a significant amount of test data, is around 47GB) I could easily fit everything on the Raptor drive.
So the questions are: How big is your desktop software stack? Do you know how all of the space is being used? Even if I were to research the topic further and gain an understanding of what the Disk Cleanup cruft was, how would I manage to prevent it from accruing in the future? If I had chosen a larger hard drive and used Windows Vista more frequently over a longer period of time, would the entire drive eventually fill up with unnecessary garbage? I'll leave you with one last question: What does this say about the long-term stability of Windows Vista?
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