Some time ago I fell off of the Microsoft bandwagon, and I seldom look back. I do, however, need to keep my skills sharp and am occasionally required to do something Windows-ish, so I keep a running Windows VM on my desktops so I can "pop in" and do what needs to be done from time to time.

Most recently, I downloaded the Windows 7 release candidate and created a little VM for it. When it fires up, it gets 1GB of RAM and has a a little 10GB partition. It uses shared folders, so I put any downloads or other work things there, taking advantage of the larger space available to my host OS.

For no reason other than to participate in a conversation, I fired up the VM today and it complained about low disk space on its C: drive. Sure enough, it only had 6MB free! I scratched my head and did a mental inventory of what I'd installed to see if it made any sense. A quick check of the "remove applications" applet in the control panel confirmed 300MB of added software, including the AVG anti-virus, Pidgin IM client, and VisualStudio Express. I double-checked and confirmed that I'd installed the VSE from the DVD ISO image which is also on the host (mounted as an optical drive in the VM), and is not taking file space on the VM drive. I did a disk clean-up, purging the Internet Explorer cache, recycle bin, and temp folder, only to gain tens of MB. Deeper in the disk clean-up tool it offered to remove all but the last restore point for me. This freed just over 200MB more, so now the VM believes the drive to have just 249MB free.

The download folder is clear, nothing in my root or desktop or other user folders that indicate remnants of downloads or other documents. I've not stared a project (and if I did, I'd use the shared folder, moving the data to the host), so there's nothing there but the OS and 300MB of installed software.

This, in my simple math, indicates that the Windows 7 installed with just one user profile, with just a few apps installed, is consuming between 9 and 9.5GB of space, all by itself.

Yikes.