Drivespace used by OS

[Guest]

How much space is required by XP Pro on the drive? I have a system that
appears to have been upgraded from 2000 to XP Pro. It was originally
connected to a network and had some network software on it. It has a 6GB hdd
and there is about 500 mb of space left. I have installed about 1.5GB of
software. Is XP using the rest of the space or may there be files left over
from 2000 that I don't know about? I have done every kind of search I can
think of to find old software and remove it, but since I don't have the
original XP install disk (machine donated to organization from contributor) I
am leery of delteing random files without knowing what they are for.

 

[Ted Zieglar]

The size of an XP installation depends on which optional portions of the
OS you have installed and other matters such whether or not you use
hibernation or whether or not you have moved the paging file off the
system partition, not to mention how much space you have specified for
TIF or restore points or the Recycle Bin, etc.

So there's no real standard size for an XP installation, but I would
estimate that most XP installations come in at somewhere between 3 and 4
GB. In any case, you will quickly run out of space on a 6 GB hard disk
once you add your own files and install software. I would recommend you
upsize the hard disk (they're real cheap these days.)

In general, a clean install of the OS is somewhat smaller than an upgrade.