There has recently been some negative talk about the footprint Vista leaves on a hard drive, but I think it needs to be put into perspective before someone says the 'B' word.

I have Vista Ultimate on an 18gb primary partition, but I install all my programs to a different partition altogether. This means my C: drive contains the operating system and pretty much nothing else.

I have around 7gb remaining on my Vista partition, which means the operating system is only using around 11gb. That includes system restore points and my swap file, which make up a few gigabytes on their own.

So you might be thinking 'wow that's still a lot of disc space', but I don't think it is. Have a look at some of the other applications you have installed and think about their function.

Take Adobe Acrobat 8 for example (Acrobloat as it is affectionately known), which has a footprint of approximately 420mb without the LiveDesigner 8 studio portion installed. Nearly half a gigabyte and its only functions are to read, edit and create a PDF. And we rightfully complain about Acrobloat because of this.

Compared to Microsoft Office 2007 with Access, Excel, Outlook, Powerpoint, Project, Publisher and Word installed, (which allow you to do a myriad of tasks, both business and creative) and is only marginally larger at around 490mb, you can start to appreciate the difference.

Also looking at any next generation Game, which is anything from 2 - 5gb and serves only a single purpose, that is a whopping amount of disc space considering.

That aside, you have to wonder about anyone complaining about loosing 11 or so gigabytes to an operating system. More features, multiple layers of security, and heaps of built-in software and you should expect the extra disc cost along with bigger RAM requirements and in some cases, hardware upgrades.

Hard drives are so cheap now. In our house we have 1.25 terabytes between 3 PC's which was quite inexpensive. And I don't consider that a lot of space, especially as I work with large multimedia files for a living. Some of my uncompressed DV captures are around 20 gigabytes. Yes I said gigabytes.

All that said, the lesser versions of Vista will have a smaller installation requirement, so don't fret. Even I would be comfortable installing any of them (including Vista Ultimate) on my Mum's 40gb laptop.