Why is it 8gb?

Im a little confused. I installed parallels, and eerything works wonderfully.

inside windows, it says its taking 2gb of 32gb.

inside OSX it says my windows image is almost 9gb? now this is a fresh xpsp2 install, no updates, nothing on desktop.


???

kgeier82 said:

Im a little confused. I installed parallels, and eerything works wonderfully.

inside windows, it says its taking 2gb of 32gb.

inside OSX it says my windows image is almost 9gb? now this is a fresh xpsp2 install, no updates, nothing on desktop.


???

Click to expand...

Have you run the compressor yet?

A bit more info:

When XP installs itself it first formats the drive then installs a basic OS to it, then it loads all the CAB files onto the drive, uncompresses them and finally extracts the files required for the full installation.

Then when it restarts (when you get the "This may take a few decades" message) it creates the large swap files and the registry and then deletes the uncompressed files.

The upshot of all this is that there are large "holes" left in the HD map so you should always defrag after an install to squeeze everything into the minimum space.

The Parallels compressor will do this for you.

Ame-Moses

im confused. if it says its only taking up 2.2gb, and thats all thats on the drive(image), then what is this compressor gonna do?

maybe im not following u, but your saying there are CAB files and such still left on the drive. Wouldnt these in fact be part of the space the image takes up?

im not sure where the Compressor is. But i am defragging the image via Parallels Image tool

kgeier82 said:

im not sure where the Compressor is. But i am defragging the image via Parallels Image tool

Click to expand...

From the Actions menu i.e the "Run Parallels Compressor" option.

You have to have XP running first and have done the "Install Parallels Tools" bit.

What I was getting at before is that the Disc Image file will grow as XP installs itself but cannot shrink when XP deletes all the temporary installation files. On a "real" PC this can result in a fragmented drive whereas with Parallels it results in a larger than needed disc image file with "holes" in it.

Compressor does a defrag and "squeeze" so that the XP installation takes up the minimum space.

One problem is that you cannot move the XP swap file while it is in use so you will never get down to the size given by XP (which probably doesn't include hidden files anyhow).

To keep the disc image to aminimum size you need to run compressor after any uninstall that you do in XP.

Amen-Moses