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We are all aware of the phenomena. It seams every new version of a popular software product taking up ever more disk space, memory and processing power than the one before. The addition of dozens of new features, templates and documentation that rarely, if ever, get used, taking up space and memory for no tangible benefit. Microsoft write the operating system used on the majority of computers in the world and this makes them a highly visible target for complaints about software bloat. Because I have data on hard drives going back 20 years I decided to take a look at how Microsoft's disk space requirements for Windows compared with computer disk capacities around the time of the release of each version to try to see if they have been using an ever larger percentage of the disk or ever decreasing portion. The question I really wanted to answer is is mores law out running software bloat or is the bloat just growing too fast. The table below lists six major version of the Microsoft Windows operating system and its hard disk space requirements. The Sweet spot column is the disk drive size sold in the release year that had the best bang for buck or the most megabytes per dollar. You can look at the this hard disk data page to see where the this information comes from and the version release data and space requirements came from wikipedia. Finally in the table I added a column to indicate the number of years before that drives in the sweet spot were sold that had a capacity still capable of containing an installation of that version of Windows.
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Version |
Space Required |
Sweet Spot That Year |
Percentage used |
Years Before that the OS Will Still Fit |
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Windows 3.1 1992 |
8 MB |
210 MB |
4% |
6 |
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Windows 95 |
50 MB |
510 MB |
9.8% |
8 |
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Windows 98 |
140 – 255 MB |
12 GB |
3% |
4-7 |
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Windows ME |
320 MB |
20 GB |
1.5% |
6 |
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Windows XP 2001 |
1.5 GB |
45 GB |
3.3% |
6 |
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Vista Ultimate 2006 |
15 GB |
250 GB |
6% |
6 |
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As you can see the proportion of the hard drive consumed by a new operating system jumps around quite a bit and there isn't any particular trend. What is apparent is that the OS always takes up less than 10% and sometimes much less. Even though Vista takes up a massive 15 Gigs of space, its merely 6% of the sweet spot disk from a year ago. There is surprising consistency in how many years prior that a sweet spot hard disk would still fit an OS. Its been written that Microsoft has always bet on Moore's law and has always won. It would almost seem that they deliberately choose how old a machine their OS would fit on because the data centres so consistently around the 6 year figure that it could almost be a development goal. From the data, at least in relation to hard disk space, it seems that software bloat is keeping very closely in line with size growth. |
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