01/12/2013

It’s getting to be that time of year again: tax time. That means I have to set up a Windows system, since the H&R Block software I use will only run on Windows. Oh joy.

Rather than “waste” a computer on an operating system I use once a year for taxes, I set up a virtual machine and installed Windows 7. I created a virtual disk of 25GB, thinking that would be plenty of space for the operating system and the handful of software packages I’ll need to install.

Boy, was I wrong.

Holy freaking crap. This is nothing more than Windows 7, Firefox, Chrome, and TaxCut. I’m pretty sure the latter three take less than 100MB combined, meaning the Windows 7 operating system requires over 19GB of space all by itself. What in the world…?

I guess I’m just spoiled by my Linux systems. The OS itself takes 40MB (I just checked my system) and even a fully-loaded system with all of the software I use in my daily work is less than 5GB.

Maybe I should go back to Windows XP for this; apparently TaxCut runs there too. Ugh.