How small can you compress your OS drive?

[Tabris DarkPeace]

How small can you compress your OS drive?

I have managed to get Windows Vista Ultimate x64 (RTM) down to 3.62 GB (compressed) but I am open to ideas and other Operating Systems (Windows, Vista, or otherwise).

This is about 4/15th's the size of the installation of Vista RTM btw.
- Installation was about 13.57GB, plus page-file and hibernation file (removed as they get automatically recreated if missing).
- This is also smaller than the DVD-ROM that Vista Ultimate x64 RTM comes on, although you can never be sure if it really does install 'everything it can' from those OS discs.

I'm quite certain that there are people out there who can compress it even more than this, using a custom 64-bit version of Clonezilla with LRZIP (64-bit), the only 'issue' being that it might only restore on a 64-bit system with well over 2GB or more of RAM given to LRZIP.
- I am fairly sure that LRZIP can do better than this, given 8GB or more of RAM to play with, and more time to prepare and pack the data down.

Personally, I'd like to get it down to under 1.70 GB one day in the 'not to distant future'.
- Beyond that, who knows?

This idea came up when reading/posting this so I thank the author of that thread for this idea in part.

 

[4745454b]

Dunno, never bothered trying. I thankfully have large enough hdds that I don't worry about such things. I slightly remember way back when installing win95 onto some ladies computer that had only a 200MB (?) hdd. By using custom install and unselecting everything including notepad and what not I JUST barely got it to fit. She had like 10MBs of left over space. Completely unusable. But for whatever reason she was happy to have 95...

 

[Tabris DarkPeace]

That would be a pretty baseline installation of Win95.
It'd be nice if Windows could opt out of having some default stuff installed today.

It should've had more than 10MB free after installation though, at least as far as I can recall.

IT Hardware is meant to be a cut throat industry, with paper thin margins. If it were possible to install modern Operating Systems on machines with 8GB SSD (dedicated to OS), and 4GB to 8GB SSD/HDD or Hybrid Hard Drive (cheaper than 32GB or 24GB SSD integrated) with adequate (read: near instantaneous response) performance they could claw back market share from Apple.

The OS's today are overly complex and obviously have a lot of redundant data (based on Long Range compression).

I'm quite surprised less 'PC Optimise / Enthusiast' types are not interested in this here (any more), and only appear to care about gaming.
Gaming is a very, very, very niché part of the market.

"In an enterprise environment -without HDD's, or SSD's in end machines- looking to upgrade from thin client to something a little better, but without going to all out desktops such minuscule differences can be the difference between winning large scale contracts or not."

 

[4745454b]

Sadly, most computers are only used for office work and "communication". Such as email, facebook, chat programs, etc. #1 "GPU" maker is Intel with their onboard IGPs. Most people simply don't need more then that. Gaming might be a niche, but it's still the most demanding thing most people will ever put their computer through.

 

[hang-the-9]

By compression do you mean disk compression which everyone stopped using because it was unstable? Full disk compression was a big thing a while ago, till it started to fail all over the place and people lost their drive data. Or do you mean by removing features/files from the Windows setup to make the setup smaller?

Very very few people will trade getting more disk space, which is very cheap and abundant as is, for reliability.

 

[giantbucket]

i can get Win VISTA down to 0 bits. just delete the mofo and use something better!

oh, and 4/15ths is a precise (albeit unusual) fraction, so saying "it's about 4/15ths" is a bit of an oxymoron.