[ashark]

What's the story on that footprint, anyway? We went from (from memory) ~250-350MB Win98 to ~700-800MB XP to ~10-15GB(!?!?!) Win7, and just up from there. Plus the default settings seemed to starting going really crazy with swapspace/caching around the time of Win7. Another 10+GB if you didn't tell it to knock that crap off. Why the sudden, giant shift? They didn't add 10-15x the features, that's for sure.

[jug]

WinSxS (Windows Side By Side) assemblies were introduced to avoid dll hell by allowing Windows to store multiple versions of installed dll's. So even a minor security patch may leave the former version around because other apps may use/expect it. I think that might add some bloat over time? Also Windows Update installer caches. A ton of Windows updates actually leave their installers around in case you want to uninstall them. That can add up! I've seen it easily get to 1-2 GB.

[bastawhiz]

They did, to some extent. Plug in almost any piece of standard consumer hardware and it'll probably mostly just work without a network connection. All those drivers don't take up zero space, but the benefit when my mom plugs in a printer and it just works makes it worth it.

[rpeden]

I think at least some of it is the Windows on Windows stuff to allow 64 bit machines to run both 32 and 64 bit software. Weren't the 32 but versions of Win7 about half the size of the 64 bit ones?

There's still a lot of size growth over time, of course.