I have done about a dozen XP installations. I’ve installed XP Home, Media Center, and Pro. The size of the initial installation using NTFS is usually at least 2GB and installing only “essential” software on the primary partition, it usually grows to about 5GB. I read a post today where the author claims that his/her XP OS with SP2 takes up only 1.2 – 1.3GB of HDD space on a 4.8GB drive. I’m curious: what is the size of your initial XP installation?

Here's What You Need to Use Windows XP Professional * PC with 300 megahertz or higher processor clock speed recommended; 233 MHz minimum required (single or dual processor system);* Intel Pentium/Celeron family, or AMD K6/Athlon/Duron family, or compatible processor recommended * 128 megabytes (MB) of RAM or higher recommended (64 MB minimum supported; may limit performance and some features) * 1.5 gigabytes (GB) of available hard disk space* * Super VGA (800 × 600) or higher-resolution video adapter and monitor * CD-ROM or DVD drive * Keyboard and Microsoft Mouse or compatible pointing device

standard xp pro installation is about 1.5 gB without the pagefile. the pagefile size is by default determined by the size of your physical RAM (x 1.5 inital size). a couple of days ago there was a post about something called 'TinyXP - The Beast Edition'. it made me curious so i googled for it and have it running now since 3 days in a 'burnout test' on a 2 GHz celeron DELL with 512 meg ram ... boy, is this baby fast :-) it sure is worth to try on older systems. TinyXP is a barebone windows xp pro OS (unattended, slipstreamed sp2 and crucial patches up to march 2006) IE6 & OE is gone, it comes with embedded Firefox 1.5.0.4 and thunderbird, the installation went in less than 10 minutes, installation size 350 MB + pagefile, OS memory usage less than 50 MB. you cannot run ms office on TinyXP because most of the jet files are ripped out, however, JRE 5 and openoffice.org run fine. using Foobaar 2000 and mpc as mediaplayer nero 7 for cd/dvd writing. the whole lot made for a compressed ghost image of less than 500MB only thing that bugs me is missing print spooler service, other than that, it's really cute. whoever hacked it did a great job proving that xp can be indeed fast as hell :-) Today's subliminal thought is: 'Calm down ... it's only ones and zeros.' icq 10183575

The initial install is usually about 1.5 GB but quickly grows to over 2.5 GB with software installs. http://computervitals.com/

As chuck2 said, the required hdd space is 1.5GB, but the actual space taken for an original XP sp1 Home version was about 1.2GB and XP sp1 Prof. was about 1.3GB. The other space requirements of the 1.5GB was needed for temp cache and should have been deleted on first boot. But as per reported, It will quickly grow to over 2GB with the installation of just 1 or 2 programs. Keep in mind that when XP first came out in 2001 the OEM builders supplied a modified OEM version of the original installation disc and these required a bit more space for installation. In The Matters Of Style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, Stand Like A Rock

Mattie, sorry! didn't mean to leave you out. You were also right on! In The Matters Of Style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, Stand Like A Rock