Just enough for my drivers and my windows XP setup will be more than enough …
I will work from another partition and the system partition will be frozen …
2Gb seem right but was using 5-10 Gb before, how much do I really need?
I'm now checking with VirtualBox If it's enough, I have access legaly to my school license …
It used 1.11Gb on 2Gb with a windows xp professionnal cd (oem, retail, msdn, …)
I know about Nlite but if you're not careful you will lose some stuffs that you need, but I was mostly asking for the default install size to use as a rule of thumb …
Best Answer
This is just a possible solution to make the XP Install take up less space.
Have you ever heard of nLite? Basically, it allows you to add/remove components to a Windows XP installation (e.g. drivers, applications, services), and create an unattended install if desired.
I always remove the stuff I don't need from Windows (e.g. firewall, defender, wireless services, indexing) to save space and increase performance (also, there's no point on keeping the Microsoft versions of software if you replace them with something else anyways).
I created one version for a Virtual PC, so I basically ripped everything out of it, and got the final install size to under 300mb (and if I compressed the image with WinRAR, the virtual hard disc shrank to ~165mb - the same size as the ISO). On my normal XP disc, which retains most functionality (including wireless), the install was about 400 to 500mb (without a pagefile!).