Feature bloat

You know what it’s like – a nice new PC, all shiny, loads of disk space.  Then three days later it’s all slow, fragmented, and you start to think that maybe the old system wasn’t that bad after all.

Well, that’s the situation here.  The brand new 120 GB disk in my new netbook (has that term been trademarked?  If so, I’m in trouble – along with maybe nearly everyone else who has written anything on the web in the last six months) is now no longer showing 120 GB of free space.

OK, I put the Technet Windows 7 beta on it – whoops, there goes well over 7 GB free space in the OS folder alone.  Then there’s everything MS loads by default into Program Files.  Plus 4.5 GB of pagefile and hiberfil.sys.

Then I started. There are all the default things, like Acrobat Reader, Irfanview, Java etc.  The whole of the Windows Live suite – or at least, all the useful bits – like Live Writer!  Now it started getting out of hand: Silverlight, Digiguide, Filezilla, KeePass, Notepad++.  Anything else?  Yes, Live Sync!  After all, why waste disk space on one PC when you can waste it on two or more?  What was surprising was that so far, the Program Files folder was still only around 1 GB in size

The final straw was Guild Wars – on its own, this doubled the Program Files folder.  However, this isn’t the worst of it: I can afford the disk space, it’s the fact that GW will probably take up all the time I’m likely to save with the new system.  Ah, the perils of new technology.