Windows 7 question for the masses
 

Friend of mine wanted me to upgrade his mothers computer to Windows 7 and 4gb of RAM. Got started tonight and discovered they only have a 32gb IDE HDD.

Windows 7 requires 16gb of space for the x86 version.

Has anyone here tried to install Win7 on such a small HDD and if so, how did it work out?

It will work fine but I hope they plan on using it strictly as an internet browser only machine.

Yeah, she only uses it for the internet and playing her solitaire games that come with the OS.

I know the machine would function better with Win7 than the bloated up XP but didn't want to make it worse by putting it on such a small HDD. Was really surprised that this old of a computer actually had a SATA HDD too.

you said in the original post that it was an IDE.

hell, he has to know someone that has a used hard drive thats bigger then that. i have old computers in my garage with 120 gig hard drives.

As was said before, they better never use it for anything but an internet browser. And load the Windows Security Essentials. Pretty lightweight and functional for a free antivirus.

Heh, yes I did. Accident. It was a Sata. I had a few 80gb IDEs in my basement but they don't have a spare IDE connection I can work with. The interior design doesn't allow me to use the IDE cable for the CD Rom drive.

Yes, I said CD ROM.

Are you sure it truly has a 32GB hard drive? That seems really odd. By the time drives that size were coming out, they had mostly shifted to multiples of 10 (10GB, 20GB, 30GB, 40GB, etc.).

And for that matter, what computer with a hard drive that small can support 4GB of RAM?

And for that matter, why wouldn't you just leave it on XP?

OK, now I'm really confused. I'm fairly confident SATA drives came around about the time that drives were in the 40-80GB range at a minimum.

Is it a SSD or something?

This.

I would check to see if your looking at a 32gb partition or something.

I believe Windows 7 require at least 1 GB RAM and Windows Xp can work well even with 512 ones.

32gb available. It's a 40gb drive. Didn't think that information really made a difference to you guys considering its 8gb of non existent space.

Stick with XP, the WINSXS directory alone will grow larger than that hard drive within 6-12 months.

hell for that matter, put an older version of Ubuntu on there. Probably more games preinstalled than Windows 7.