title: What's in a footprint? link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2009/01/31/whats-in-a-footprint/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 387 created: 2009/01/31 22:22:56 created_gmt: 2009/01/31 22:22:56 comment_status: open post_name: whats-in-a-footprint status: publish post_type: post

What's in a footprint?

Google the words, “windows 7 footprint”, and you’re likely to get back an interesting collection of articles.

The physical disk space that operating systems consume has been increasing exponentially over the years, as more and more capability was packed into the O/S as opposed to user land applications. Over in the Linux world we’ve been seeing steady movement away from this. Most distros now have a Live CD that can install a minimal build on your machine that you can add components to as needed. My own “fully loaded” (just think, “every developer tool available”) Ubuntu desktop machine at home currently uses a little more than 6 Gb. The “minimal client” Windows XP machine I have been using for testing at work, on the other hand, uses about 9 Gb. My more fully outfitted Windows XP laptop image takes up around 19 Gb.

There are two reasons footprint makes a difference. First, because the more space given over to the O/S, the less you have for applications and data. In an age of 500 Gb hard disks that might sound irrelevant, but given recent hardware developments like the overnight success of the netbook with solid state drives in the 8 - 16 Gb range, it may turn into a market imperative. Second, and perhaps more importantly in light of the netbook phenomenon, being able to fit the entire O/S into RAM could be a critical requirement for performance reasons.

One good article I found on Windows 7’s disk usage was this post from the blog written by the Windows 7 developers. From the main body and the comments I didn’t see anything that would lead me to believe that a minimal install of Windows 7 would be much smaller than my own Windows XP “minimal client” build. That’s disappointing. As one commenter put it, “Windows should be able to boot from a device with less than 4Gb RAM”. I wholeheartedly agree. Of course even though many Linux distro Live CDs do just that, the further question of just how usable the resulting image is has to be considered. I ran into this when looking for an alternative to Sugar and the Fedora 9 based O/S on the OLPC XO-1 machine we have at home. In the end I decided that none of the other distros could run any better, and some much worse, on that resource-challenged hardware.

Anyway, I’ll soon see for myself. Having downloaded the Windows 7 Beta iso, I’ve decided to do my own evaluation to determine if Microsoft is finally moving in the right direction.

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