Windows What Size Windows 7.1 Partition Under Bootcamp?

[Guardsix]

Maybe some of you guys and gals that play Windows games using a Bootcamp partition on you iMac or MacBook Pro can give me an answer.

I used a 70GB partition. I installed Windows 7.1 Professional and now am attempting to install Windows 10. The installation program comes back and says I need to have a least 8GB on the hard drive. I check and I have only 6GB left.

Why is the Windows 7.1 install so large? What can I delete?

Thanks.

 

[cruisin]

Overtime you download updates and it adds to the space used. You might have installed the language packs so you can remove the ones you don't use. Realistically you can move a few games to an external and then move them back afterwards, it should work without uninstalling. Maybe check what music/movies/documents you have?

WinDirStat: https://windirstat.info/download.html is a great app that shows you in a nice graphical way what is eating up the space.

 

[Guardsix]

Thanks for the reply. The thing is, this was a brand new, from scratch install on a clean partition. There was absolutely nothing else installed on the Win7 Pro partition. I even ran Disk Cleanup a couple of times, including cleaning system files and it didn't change much. I've haven't even installed an anti-virus or malware application or program.

Good idea about deleting the language files I don't need. Not sure how much space that will save me, but I'll give it a try. I think I'm going to have to re-do the partition anyway because it's not going to have any space for a few games I want to load.

 

[saturnotaku]

Disabling hiberation and system restore, as well as shrinking your page/swap file will free up hard drive space. Hibernate and the page file are sized according to how much RAM you have, so if you have 16 GB, that's 32 GB right there.

Normally I recommend 120 GB as an absolute minimum for a Windows installation, especially if you're going to have a game or two on there.

 

[Yebubbleman]

Maybe some of you guys and gals that play Windows games using a Bootcamp partition on you iMac or MacBook Pro can give me an answer.

I used a 70GB partition. I installed Windows 7.1 Professional and now am attempting to install Windows 10. The installation program comes back and says I need to have a least 8GB on the hard drive. I check and I have only 6GB left.

Why is the Windows 7.1 install so large? What can I delete?

Thanks.

Sorry, Windows 7.1?

 

[saturnotaku]

Sorry, Windows 7.1?

I would guess Windows 7, Service Pack 1, which is not Windows "7.1."

 

[Dirtyharry50]

A default Windows 7 SP1 install with all updates applied weighs in at about 40 gigs, slightly less I think like maybe 38 or 39 gigs. This is after running disk cleanup primarily to remove all the system restore points created during all the updating. I just did this very recently and paid attention to this out of curiosity because as i recalled from previously having installed Windows 10, it used less space than Windows 7.

If all you are going to do is play games and if you cannot upgrade your GPU to a DX 12 capable one (or already have one) I see little point in upgrading to Windows 10 which is going to break some older games that run just fine on Windows 7. I ran into this and it played into my decision to go back to Win7. I saw no appreciable benefit to the upgrade from a purely gaming perspective given that I cannot upgrade the GPU in my iMac to take advantage of the only gaming benefit Win10 offers.

An important thing to keep in mind about the free Windows 10 upgrade is the it works like an OEM copy of Windows - it is tied to the hardware it is installed on permanently. So grabbing it now thinking you can then install it onto a future system that can benefit from it won't help you. You won't be able to do that as the hardware changes will be too many to get away with that and validate it. That's why I decided it had little to offer me also. I can never use DirectX 12 on this iMac and I cannot take the free Windows 10 to my next Mac so why bother?

So if you play many older games, even a few years old, you are probably better off not bothering in my opinion. It was not perceptibly faster in any way. I disliked the UI changes myself but that's a subjective thing I know. I think Win7 looks nicer personally.

Just my two cents and something to think about.

There is one last thing I would add, unless you are installing Steam games to an external drive 70 gigs is cutting it pretty close considering the size of many games even going back some years now. Considering Windows eats more than half that off the top, it does not leave much room to install games unless you don't need or want to keep many installed at any one time. It's a good idea to check sizes of stuff you'd like to install and keep installed and then figure a buffer just to be safe on top of that keeping in mind how much Windows consumes to begin with when deciding how big you want your bootcamp partition to be assuming you can spare it from the space you need for OS X, etc.

 

[madeirabhoy]

A default Windows 7 SP1 install with all updates applied weighs in at about 40 gigs, slightly less I think like maybe 38 or 39 gigs. This is after running disk cleanup primarily to remove all the system restore points created during all the updating. I just did this very recently and paid attention to this out of curiosity because as i recalled from previously having installed Windows 10, it used less space than Windows 7.

If all you are going to do is play games and if you cannot upgrade your GPU to a DX 12 capable one (or already have one) I see little point in upgrading to Windows 10 which is going to break some older games that run just fine on Windows 7. I ran into this and it played into my decision to go back to Win7. I saw no appreciable benefit to the upgrade from a purely gaming perspective given that I cannot upgrade the GPU in my iMac to take advantage of the only gaming benefit Win10 offers.

An important thing to keep in mind about the free Windows 10 upgrade is the it works like an OEM copy of Windows - it is tied to the hardware it is installed on permanently. So grabbing it now thinking you can then install it onto a future system that can benefit from it won't help you. You won't be able to do that as the hardware changes will be too many to get away with that and validate it. That's why I decided it had little to offer me also. I can never use DirectX 12 on this iMac and I cannot take the free Windows 10 to my next Mac so why bother?

So if you play many older games, even a few years old, you are probably better off not bothering in my opinion. It was not perceptibly faster in any way. I disliked the UI changes myself but that's a subjective thing I know. I think Win7 looks nicer personally.

Just my two cents and something to think about.

There is one last thing I would add, unless you are installing Steam games to an external drive 70 gigs is cutting it pretty close considering the size of many games even going back some years now. Considering Windows eats more than half that off the top, it does not leave much room to install games unless you don't need or want to keep many installed at any one time. It's a good idea to check sizes of stuff you'd like to install and keep installed and then figure a buffer just to be safe on top of that keeping in mind how much Windows consumes to begin with when deciding how big you want your bootcamp partition to be assuming you can spare it from the space you need for OS X, etc.

agree with all of that. i have gone for windows 10 but there's no benefit and some draw backs in terms of problems i never had with 7, that ill probably go back to 7.


in terms of the size of partition, for me its always half my disc size. with my old min's 500 gig, 250gig windows...with my imac's 1tb, its 500gig windows. with steam i dont like to delete games, i know i can download again but its a pain, and with my internet its fine (100mb) except if i download a lot it gets throttled, and all my tv comes off of it, so my bootcamp will always have about 200-300gigs of games sitting there. i mean some games, fallout 4, shadows of mordor, max payne 3, any of the COD games are 30-40 gigs a game. 5 of them and you are 200gigs plus windows...

 

[Dirtyharry50]

agree with all of that. i have gone for windows 10 but there's no benefit and some draw backs in terms of problems i never had with 7, that ill probably go back to 7.


in terms of the size of partition, for me its always half my disc size. with my old min's 500 gig, 250gig windows...with my imac's 1tb, its 500gig windows. with steam i dont like to delete games, i know i can download again but its a pain, and with my internet its fine (100mb) except if i download a lot it gets throttled, and all my tv comes off of it, so my bootcamp will always have about 200-300gigs of games sitting there. i mean some games, fallout 4, shadows of mordor, max payne 3, any of the COD games are 30-40 gigs a game. 5 of them and you are 200gigs plus windows...

I think that is a good way to go to for someone gaming a lot as I do also. When I put Win7 back on this time I finally had the smarts to just allot a lot of space for Windows so I can stop screwing around with bootcamp, not having enough room, redoing it, etc. I went 50/50 too on my 1TB disk and its fine. All my apps and data in OS X really don't require a lot of space. On that side, again it is games that consume the most but I still have a fair amount of room to keep certain ones around while changing out various single player one time experiences so that works. There's a lot of stuff for me in Windows like various strategy and other stuff that is highly replayable that it is nice to just leave installed for when the mood strikes and now I have ample room both sides to do that.

 

[Huntn]

On my MBP, my Bootcamp Partition is 220GB while my MacOSX partition is 400GB. I have 2 external portable 1TB drives I use for extra storage as required.