MacBook Air 128GB SSD Windows 7 size not right or is it?

Here is your answer...

No need for that... the question is more along the lines of how much space does Boot camp actually require as well as Windows.

It's a fair question because I'm trying to figure out how big a partition I should make Boot Camp on my next MBA 11" with a 128gb SSD. Only need it for basic Office needs (in case Office 2011 fails on me) and am planning on going Win7 32-bit since I have an unused copy of it.

Which version or type (or whatever) of Windows 7 is the least expensive (yet still legal) that we can use for a Bootcamp/Parallels setup?

i wouldn't try with less than 40GB.

Artmuzz said:

I just created a partition using BootCamp on my MacBook Air 11inch 128GB SSD. The partition size I chose was 24GB. Anyway after installing Windows 7 64bit on this partition I was shocked to find that I only have 8GB left on the partition. Surely Windows 7 64bit and the BootCamp drivers dont use up 16GB of space?

Please advise.

Art

Click to expand...

That's normal. Windows 7 itself takes up 10-12GB of space, then you have the pagefile, hibernation file (which in your case should be 4GB & 3GB respectively), System Restore backups and possibly Service Pack backups.

The Boot Camp drivers are about 700MB before installation, I'm not sure how much they are afterwards.

Oh and FYI current versions of OS X report space differently than Windows, so Windows will report that you have less space than OS X; In Lion 1GB is 1,000,000,000 bytes| In Windows 1GB is 1,073,741,824 bytes


More information and ways to regain some space:
https://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=12672619
https://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=12593242
https://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=12626242

I am using Windows 7 64bit and getting about the same results except I have a 34 GB partition. I also turned off hibernation and reduced the pagefile to 512MB.

For basic Office tools and so forth, is there much benefit of installing WinXP 64-bit then since it takes up a lot of space (on a very limited in size SSD).