Setting up Vista

So, how much space do you think you would be left with after installing Vista enterprise edition? The files take up around 2Gb of space on a DVD. Allowing for them to expand from their compressed form and adding about one and a half times the size of memory for the swapfile, I make that about 4.5Gb of used hard disk space on my laptop that has 1Gb of Ram. Add another 500Mb for luck and OS updates calling the final figure around the 5Gb mark.

Wrong! I was quite shocked that almost 10 Gb of hard disk space had been used up. All I had done was to install the OS into the 16Gb partition I had reserved for Vista, thinking that would be more than enough. Then I installed drivers, and downloaded OS updates. Where on earth had all my hard disk space gone?

At this point it may be interesting to point out the experience of installing an OS on other platforms. Firstly lets look at OSX, a base install of which comes in at around 3Gb after OS updates have been installed. Once the admittedly rather large iLife suite (a digital lifestyle suite of 5 powerful applications) is installed this reaches a quite large 9Gb. The Mac is supporting both 64 bit and 32 bit apps, but is also supporting two processor lines having the ability to seamlessly run software made for the PowerPC or Intel processors.

With Linux, the installation process and efficiency is most impressive. Linux comes in many guises or "distributions", Ubuntu Linux installs from a 700Mb CD ROM, it expands very quickly to just over 2Gb. This not only includes a state of the art OS, but also many large applications including a full office suite!


The Disk Usage Utility that comes with Ubuntu 8.10

Why am I insisting on installing Vista on a 16Gb partition on a 3 year old laptop? The first reason is that I want a level playing field to test Vista against Ubuntu because you really start to see the relative efficiencies of an operating system when it is running on the same hardware. As I write this using Vista my laptop fan is blowing twice as hard as it does in Ubuntu when doing the same task, seeming to suggest that the computer is having to work harder to run Vista. I am using Firefox 3 and Google docs in both OS's so there is no difference between them.

So what can be done about Vista's heavy demand for storage space? Not a lot, it turns out. Whatever you do, don't delete what might appear to be duplicates from within the 'winsxs' folder. These are not duplicate files, but duplicate references to files. A colleague of mine found the perfect link describing what on earth the oft misunderstood 'winsxs' folder actually is, many thanks for that Neil.

http://blogs.technet.com/askcore/archive/2008/09/17/what-is-the-winsxs-directory-in-windows-2008-and-windows-vista-and-why-is-it-so-large.aspx

To try to slim things down the first thing I did was to turn off system restore, this means that your system will not be able to turn the clock back to a date before you installed that buggy driver. This will save you well over 1 GB of space.

Secondly, I set custom settings for the swap file so that it was set to a permanent size and was stored on another partition. This begs the question "how efficient is paged memory when used as a file on a filesystem, instead of using a whole partition for swapspace?". Linux uses a partition for its swapfile. This not only appears to be faster and more efficient, but is a boon on a system running many OS's. Each copy of Linux can make use of the same swap partition.

I was quite shocked to see a 'hyberfile.sys' file on drive C:. This is a hibernation file generated when the system hibernates. Why was it on my drive when I have never hibernated this system? TechTalkz.com comes to the rescue with the answer.

http://www.techtalkz.com/tips-n-tricks/3871-how-disable-hibernation-windows-vista.html

Amazingly Vista had made the decision for me that it would generate a hibernation file, even though I had never used or planned to use the feature. Turning it off involved me having to run the command line prompt as an administrator by right clicking on it and choosing "run as administrator" to avoid the "You do not have permission to enable or disable the hibernation feature" error message. I was logged in as an administrator with user account control (a subject for another blog entry) switched on, I expected to be able to issue the command from a prompt with the UAC pop up appearing to raise my privileges when needed, this did not happen. I was also surprised that there was no ability to turn off hibernation using a control panel and that it was impossible to remove many windows components using the "Programs and features" control panel.

Thirdly I used the excellent 'CCleaner' application to clear out old data including old prefetch data and caches.

What is the result of all these settings? The system had grown to have over 12Gb used, perilously close to the 16Gb partition limit. With the above settings it is now using a much healthier 8Gb. Although after streamlining Vista it is still 3 times bigger than Linux!

What can Microsoft do to improve these issues?

1. Let the user choose which additional apps to install when installing Windows
2. Allow the ability to remove windows components
3. Make memory usage more efficient
4. Use tighter coding for applications and their data
5. Do not assume what the user wants, a hibernation file should only exist after the user has chosen to use that function
6. Use swap partitions
7. Improve UAC