For one of the projects I’m working on, I’m setting up a virtual server for QA purposes. To allow testing, we created a virtual hard disk of each platform that we deploy our application on. Nothing else was installed on these images, except for the OS and (possibly) an associated version of Office.

The numbers say it all. Vista is at least 5 times the size of a comparable XP installation. And for what? Aero? This is why I’m sticking with XP for now.

Don’t ask me how the Vista image without Office is actually larger than the one with Office 2007, though…