Hi, Giktayms! Gigabytes on hard drives and SSDs do not happen much because all the files (apart from documents and ever-living MP3-tracks) from year to year become just more massive. Today we will check how content on “just computers” has grown in volumes since Windows XP and to our time.



Computers change even faster than children grow up or music styles become obsolete. It is very difficult to describe the memories of the gland, because software always comes to the fore. Say, “this is the first time I launched% name_games% and was shocked to the depths of my soul by its atmosphere”, or “I decided once to look at the development environment with a primitive self-help book, and then wrap everything up ~”. The quality of the processor is usually remembered only when speaking about games / file coding / compilation, video cards are mentioned even less often. And we usually remember only one thing about storage devices - they put damn, criminal, indecent little space for files that I would like to perpetuate on my home PC.
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After all, even in modern times the situation has not changed much, quite the contrary - critics of the development of accumulators were divided into several camps. Supporters of the SSD are satisfied with the speed, but they nod at the modest capacity of the drives in our age of ultra-high resolutions and indecently heavy games. After all, cloud technologies today work similarly to a shelf with compact discs: if you really need to, you can get content, but still dozens of gigabytes of “in the open field” are still not an easy task.

And even users of hard drives (not counting hardcore enthusiasts with monstrous storage in their home PCs) like to lament the fact that “software is now obese”, monstrous volumes are necessary for a collection of films in decent quality, and games occupy dozens of gigabytes even in the case of “corridor” postrelushki "with ordinary graphics.

It turns out that the situation with free space on the drives only aggravated in comparison with the good old times? Or is it the habit of people to “whitewash” memories and criticize modernity? From what moment did we learn to waste and began to operate with hundreds of gigabytes even in minimally packed computers? For the sake of experiment, we will look into our digital past and compare the “thickness” of software and content from the beginning of the two thousandth to our days.

Your experiment is not an experiment.

And he does not claim scientific value, for several reasons at once. First, a monumental study with calculations of hundreds of programs will result in “catching fleas” and dissertation boredom. And secondly, from such a meticulous article it will not be easier for anyone (it will be harder from particulars and investigations on the changelogs, whether the program is soundly stout). And that's not the point - Sofia Rotaru guarantees .
And the essence is in nostalgia, observation of the milestones of history and the search for a “point of no return”, starting from which content began to spread around computers at an alarming rate.


This guy also knows about overloading, but, unlike us, calculations do not lead

Milestones in the development of home computers, of course, overlap with the success of Windows Office, so we will spread software, games and videos in Windows operating systems: XP SP1 x86, Vista SP1 x86, 7 SP1 x64, 8.1 x64, 10 x64. We took the ancient versions of Windows in 32-bit version for greater historical accuracy, patched to the SP1 version - in order to catch the options of the systems in their prime. The only exception was the “ten”, which was tested in its current form and personifies our happy present.

Test set - reasonable, kind, eternal

The protagonist of all home computers running Windows is Microsoft Office. Its output was not always confined to the release of the operating system, but for each version of the "windows" was just as modern version of the office suite.
It is easy to compare the warm with the soft, ancient build ICQ with the modern version of Telegram, etc. Instead, it would be wiser to watch software from a time of the “even those” who have modern followers. Therefore, in the role of the experimental messenger, we took Skype - an honored veteran of IP-telephony, hotly criticized for the quality of the code and marketing changes, but still alive.


Our experimental

Browsers and antiviruses are a slippery and holivar theme. Especially since IE has long been the most popular tool for surfing the web, and for religious reasons I would not want to take it out. However, we have another "Masthev" -PO within our latitudes.
The most famous nailing microscope, and simply deadly power is a tool that for some reason is processed by amateur photos - Adobe CS / CC and Photoshop in particular. Graphic editor for all occasions and under all Windows "modern history."

It is good to note the engine of progress in non-professional PC - games. Since the beginning of the two thousand, many titles have survived to our days, but there are not so many really intense series that would have found a representative for every Windows release year. Call of Duty is one of them, and take it as a measure of game transformations.
“Catching fleas” and looking for changes in the bitrate of MP3 files would not be desirable, but there is a reason for the increase in video heaviness. Almost in any cinema world there is a pack of films released shortly after the announcement of new Windows, but today we chose the “X-Men” franchise - the adventures of mutant people got so many episodes that based on this series it was easiest to study the evolution of video files and formats.

Act I. How young we were (Windows XP)

Once upon a time, the multi-colored and decorated with gradients of XP seemed to be an ultramodern system, but today it looks like a “hero of bygone times” - funny in its antiquity, but not very efficient.
And yet, it is impossible not to be touched by the compactness of the old Windows - 1 GB for the operating system itself + a couple more "hectares" for official needs (the paging file, user profiles, drivers, etc.). For comparison - Android 6.0 with the TouchWiz shell in the Samsung Galaxy S7 occupies 8 GB . And what do you propose to fill in the catchy list “why Android is 4 times better than Windows XP”?


Warm transistor Windows XP

Along with Windows, Microsoft released Office XP, but since we are talking about a “post-service pack” period, let’s take the example of the great and terrible Office 2003 - the last of the MS office packages with a classic design. In its full “professional” edition with an integrated SP3, the office suite took away 1.1 GB of storage.
Actual for 2003, Adobe Photoshop CS (8.0) took 300 MB that was ridiculous by today's standards - the program was really compact for its capabilities.

Today, it seems that Activision has released its shooters from the first years of Christ, but in fact the first part of Call of Duty came to light a year after the release of the XP debut service pack - in 2003. In those years, distributions of games were easily placed on a simple 700-megabyte CD, and after unpacking they often took up twice the space. In our case, the shooter "sprawled" by 1.4 GB, taking into account the files of DirectX 9, without which the game on XP simply will not start. Not so little, given that in the course of the users most often had HDD capacity of 120 and 160 GB.
The powerful and heavy Skype in the early 2000s was a tiny and modest online phone in beta (0.97) and occupied 8.8 MB of disk space. The current version for Android, for example, is four and a half times larger.
The first part of the superhero thriller "X-Men" (the actual spill) was born in 2000, but on DVD it was released a lot later. But who are we kidding - at the time of the hegemony of the GeForce FX 5000 series and representatives of the Radeon 9000, PC users were happy with the built-in MPEG-4 video decoders and were content with “DVD-quality” in multiply compressed DivX videos. All the same "X-Men" in the "popular" container. Avi with actual quality for antiquity took 734 MB from our drive.
Thus, in the days of Windows XP, the set for “play-see-movie-and-work” was easily placed on 6 “with a penny” GB of disk space.

Act II. “Eyes are afraid - hands make” (Windows Vista)

Vista is like a quick-witted young lady - she always knew how to make an IT guy feel awkward. And how many “children's” (and not very) injuries the experimental system Microsoft left it to its users - even to this day, when it is launched on powerful equipment, you are preparing for a dirty trick and poor performance.
But there were many brave users who couldn’t / didn’t want to roll back to a faster XP, received security updates and believed in the bright future of the new product. Let's see how such brave men dealt with disk space.


Already not on its own? You have not seen her in battle!

Freshly installed Vista uses affordable capacity, like American gasoline cars - “wide and big.” Even the 32-bit version of the OS takes up 11.2 GB of space immediately after installation - 2 times more than our XP with all the amenities, so to speak. For the sake of mind-blowing (at that time) design, users were happy to endure such tranquility, but the system ate the processor resources with the same eagerness. However, today we are not talking about the CPU, but about the drives.
At the same time, Microsoft, preventing users from coming to their senses, rolled out Office 2007 with an innovative Ribbon ribbon interface and a new file format - OOXML (all of these are your .docx and their like). The most complete edition of Office 2007 - Enterprise - with all the updates has grown to 2.7 GB. Of course, before the introduction of service packs, the office was less heavy, but let's not “catch fleas” in an attempt to get the original versions of the package and take its safest variants as a starting point.
Almost simultaneously with Vista, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was born. This is today the shooters in the modern / futuristic setting cause contempt of the players - in 2007, gamers observed the dominance of postrelushek on the theme of the Second World War, against which COD 4 became a real revelation. Despite the fact that a little later the “advanced” Crysis came, and the brainchild of Activision only supported DirectX 9.0, the game was wildly popular. The payback was about 7.8 GB after installation - a serious value for the games of that time.

Skype in the Vista era was beautiful - it had not yet become a voracious combine with “parade, bears, gypsies, hang-gliders, acrobats and midget jugglers on tricycles”, but it already got support for video and went through “polishing” in the final versions 3.x . After installation, the client has already occupied 51 MB. Not such a big payment for the increased functionality.
"Photoshop" of the whole world switched to Adobe Photoshop CS3, which became more agile and more functional than the outdated versions. Of course, the graphics package gained weight, but not critical. A set of programs in CS3 has grown to 2 GB - more than an impressive increase in comparison with the first CS, but then this is specialized software.

With file formats on the PC, a crossroads reigned - most PC users treated HD video as a luxury, H.264 format had difficulty making its way, and only the latest GPUs were able to accelerate it with hardware. Frankly, the most popular packaging options for movies was a 1.3 GB DivX file, but the shortcomings of such videos were already noticeable to many, so for some time there were full-length DVD-5 images over 4 GB in size. In the case of the “X-Men X 2” - 4.6 GB.
The assumptions of assumptions, and at the time of Windows Vista, a set of applications / content of the same nature required about 30 GB of free space on the drive. Four to five times (depending on how you feel about DVD-5) the difference compared to the realities of the era of Windows XP.

Act III. “You do not wake me - I feel so good” (Windows 7)

It would be better if the codename of Windows 7 was not Vienna, but Satisfaction. Because the operating system has become a massive work on the bugs and so respected users, that to this day reigns on every second PC in the world. Adherents of the "seven" still do not find compelling reasons for upgrading to new versions of the operating system, but the system has already turned almost 7 years old. Immediately after installing Windows 7 takes 13.4 GB on the system disk.


Windows 7 is like a wife for many users: it is no longer young and passionate, but it’s so comfortable with it ...

Call of Duty by the time turned into a “dynamically developing”, but, nevertheless, the conveyor for the production of futuristic shooters. At the time of the release of Windows 7, Activision released Modern Warfare 2 - the game was refined in trivialities compared to the original MW, the network mode was improved, the scandal caused a controversial storyline mission, and generally had fun. But the game occupied 13.5 GB of memory, which was quite sane for its times.
Since that time, Ribbon has stopped causing attacks of rejection among PC users, so Microsoft simply “refined” an innovative office suite, added the ability to customize the tape, implemented a new interface, for example, in Outlook, and so on. But the heaviness of the “office” is only increasing - almost 3 GB (or more than four in the Office Plus edition) in the prescribed form.
By this time, Skype had mastered full-screen calls, introduced new codecs and combined the application interface into a hefty single window. And all this - at 64 megabytes on the drive!

Adobe Photoshop in CS5 version has got a new interface, learned to work more elegantly with text and has acquired a number of improvements. From now on, the designer package occupies 2.4 GB after installation.
As for the video, the HD and Full HD files walked briskly around the world. True, Blu-ray images remained the lot of aesthetes, and BDRip 1080p format video became the “people's” choice. "X-Men: First Class" at this level of quality will take about 14 GB on the drive.
But we overcame the psychological barrier, ladies and gentlemen - 50 GB on the drive in Windows 7 "for everything a little bit." However, already at the time of Windows 7 there was a reason to separate the system disk from the secondary drives - the same SSD Kingston E and M-series were already available to the retail buyer.

Act IV. "Tiles are the future" (Windows 8.1)

According to the good old tradition, Microsoft was faced with the discontent of users when it began to focus on a single, sorry for the expression, user experience in touchscreen devices and traditional desktops. Even with a higher (relative to Windows 7) performance, the G8 in 2012 was taken cool by the buyers. Therefore, Microsoft gathered strength and a year later released a major update - not that the new OS at all, but a very impressive service pack. But, since MS took tablet PCs into sight, Windows has become extremely compact - 9.6 GB on the system disk immediately after installation!


Fans and nonlovers of exotic talk about Windows 8 / 8.1 in the opposite way

The volume of typical PC games since Windows 7 has seriously increased - the notorious Call of Duty has become radically "thicker" without a serious upgrade of graphics or gameplay. However, COD Ghosts was remembered by the public except by the increased degree of drama and the dog as one of the actors in the action. And gluttony - gluttony in everything. That only cost 6 GB of RAM in the minimum (!) Requirements for the game. Today, PC gamers have come to terms with even more formidable numbers, but in 2013, players did not appreciate this move and even released a “patch” to start the game with 4 GB of RAM. And how do you 34 GB of storage space on the drive after installation?
Microsoft made Office 2013 friends with cloud storage and touch input, integrated Skype into it, and made other regular updates. For once, an active hunt for users ended, and a “subscription office” appeared, i.e. Office 365. Office added in the size and number of programs, after which it began to occupy more than 8 GB after installation, compared with 2.9 GB in the case of the 2010 version.

Skype finally mutated into a slow-moving combine without much increase in functionality, and in the sixth version it did not arouse the enthusiasm of users. However, it still remained the unwritten standard of Internet telephony, even despite similar functionality in mobile clients of WhatsApp, Viber, and others. Now the program for calls and correspondence has taken almost 100 unfortunate MB away from the drive! Little things, of course, but a banal instant messenger with a video call could be a little more economical.
Photoshop and his retinue changed the paradigm and turned into subscription services. And the volume of the software package has grown to an already serious 4.7 GB.
The 4K format was more likely to have a bright future than an objective reality, but the demands of movie lovers have grown - now there were no longer any ripped-down full-blown BDRemux with high bitrate and sound quality that were already used. The Wolverine: Immortal film, finalized in this way, will occupy almost 30 GB on your SSD / HDD. Modern compression algorithms do not keep pace with the resolution and user requests, alas.

That's how we live - Windows “has lost weight”, Office is also, but high-quality video and permanent “obesity” of third-party software have led to the fact that our set of goodies exceeded 85 GB. That's why three years ago you should have removed the 120-gigabyte SSD from your laptop and bought a juicy, fast, efficient Kingston drive with a capacity over 240 GB. :)

Act V. Recent history. (Windows 10)

Classifying Windows 10 in one phrase is unlikely to succeed - the operating system, according to Microsoft, will be repeatedly and radically updated from year to year. Scandals around the collection of data on the use of "dozens" of users do not subside from the very first public versions of the system, but there are some arguments in favor of the upgrade from Redmond, and then it’s up to users to decide. The new "OS" was fiercely optimized for mobile computers, so even the 64-bit version is currently taking a ridiculous 10 GB of hard disk / SSD.


Hedgehog, crossed with a snake on the guard of evolution

Office received an index of 2016, honored the full-fledged presence of mobile platforms and focused on collaboration with documents. There was no historical “upgrade”, as in the case of the transition of versions 2003-2007, for a long time, but are revolutions necessary in the working tool? In any case, the office package received “liposuction” - its full edition now occupies 5.2 GB on the drive.
Cyberpunk was no longer the same, and the soldiers in the exoskeleton turned into grim titans - the Call of Duty of the 2015 sample turned into a drama about a bleak future. Suffering and despair in the game exactly on 62 GB after installation, Karl! Habr! Hiktames!
What grace to expect from pictures in movies, if new pictures rarely come out in 4K resolution, and the usual Full HD has become boring? That's right - squeeze all the juices from Blu-ray 3D. In this format, movies eats about fifty gigabytes on SSD / HDD, but the pleasure of watching is worth it, and few people decide to arrange a warehouse from movies on a home PC today. The luxury of watching such videos is estimated at about 53 GB on the drive (“X-Men: Days of the Future Past”, for example).

Skype, in the seventh version, acquired functional video conferencing, learned how to send messages offline and receive them from offline, and also began to receive security updates with enviable regularity. In general, like all "old men", he is more often engaged in the correction of well-being, rather than functional feats. And the developers have returned it to the framework of decency, so the installed program now takes less than 100 MB.
Adobe Creative Cloud 2015 "model year" received a means to search for photos, improved work with layers, integration with iOS and minor innovations in the interface. The size of the graphics package in comparison with the previous version is almost unchanged and is 4.6 GB after installation.

Total

The total consumption of storage capacity.
Thank you for the illustration. AngReload

Epilogue

Software developers hardly believe in the magic of numbers or agree behind users' backs, but the fact remains that the content on computers began to rapidly get fat from about 2010. So, it is necessary to divide the software into "several varieties." The most demanding of speed programs and games befits to work on the mighty SSD Kingston, and let everything else rest on the "skewer with pancakes." Moreover, Kingston is ready to respect both budget shoppers (SSDNow V series and UV series to help!), And passionaries (HyperX SSDs have been lit, lit and will be lit!). Who is already excited - choose the appropriate SSD to your taste and wallet.
In any case, the accumulators of the new model outbid their mechanical predecessors, and the nerve cells are not restored, so join the fans of modern drives and let your desires coincide with your gigabytes!

Thank you for your attention and stay with Kingston on Hiktatimes!

For more information about Kingston and HyperX products, visit the company's official website . In choosing your kit HyperX help page with visual aids .