Win 8 installation size

[soarfm]

Recently installed Win 8 on bootcamp partition. I'd read a minimum of 20gb was necessary for the install so I sized it to 40gb. Everything installed fine.

This is a basic system installation and the only additional software is firefox browser and classic shell.

Bootcamp shows that almost 36gb is in use yet when I manually tally the size of the folders on the partition it comes out to less than 20gb.

What am I missing here? Do I have 16gb of hidden files? Is this normal? I'm getting ready to nuke and repave to a bigger partition but I thought I'd ask here before I make more work for myself.

Thanks.

 

[jenzjen]

I always use 60Gb just in case, but if you have sufficient RAM (8 hopefully 16Gb), you can disable both the pagefile and hibernation, the latter of which is what's using most of that space.

 

[Stooby Mcdoobie]

Also, keep in mind that Windows uses binary instead of base-10 like OS X (1GB in Windows ≈ 0.93GB in OS X). So you're already "losing" a few GB to begin with.