[kronos29296]

It does make me wonder where did the rest of the space in a Windows CD go to? I mean they needed a full cd for it and it wasn't even a live cd. And React OS should atleast have most of WinXP's features and yet is much smaller. What did microsoft use the rest of the space for?

[Const-me]

Just because it shows an Explorer doesn’t mean it includes most WinXP features.

Device drivers: Driver.cab is 60MB. Localizations: LANG folder takes 100MB. .NET Framework: 41MB. Various migration tools to upgrade from Win95: 32MB.

[badsectoracula]

Microsoft Bob:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/2008.07.windowsc...

[t90fan]

MS windows ships with a lot more drivers, and translations, or one.

[frik]

ReactOS ships with more translations than any Microsoft Windows. But translation does take much space, it's just text in RC files linked to binary files.

[bonzini]

Lots of drivers, for one, and a lot more functionality (the live CD certainly doesn't do Active Directory!).

Plus, everything in the base system is in two copies, one for the boot environment and one for the installed version, similar to initramfs and RPMs for Linux.

[dx034]

Probably the same reasons why the Facebook App uses 3 times as much space as this whole OS: Legacy Code, Visualisations and using numerous libraries.

[anyfoo]

Libraries? What libraries does a Windows implementation use, except for the ones that it implements?

[Endy]

Resource storage (codecs, etc), software not necessarily built into the OS, and similar.

[kuschku]

Roughly 20% of the space used in Windows’ exe’s and .dll’s is EXIF and similar metadata in image assets. It’s very wasteful.

They probably never tried to reduce the size.

[mmastrac]

This seems unlikely, but giving you the benefit of the doubt - is there some research on this?

[noisem4ker]

Windows is Bloated, Thanks to Adobe’s Extensible Metadata Platform https://www.thurrott.com/windows/109962/windows-bloated-than...

Also previously discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14192353

It turns out that the overall Windows bloat due to XMP tags amounts to something like 5MB.

[kuschku]

Interesting, I missed the follow up, and had only read https://www.thurrott.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Bloat-Gr...

[you_are_wrong]

This is not true, it's a much smaller percentage, negligible overall.