Reduce Windows footprint ???
I cannot believe everybody on here fell for this BS.
They want to reduce the footprint of Windows, fair enough, is about time they did and, instead of looking how to reduce the Windows footprint, they start off with stuff I would not consider part of the windows footprint, I am looking at you, recovery partition. Then they wanna revive doublespace ...
Why can they not just take a blank sheet of paper, write down all the dependencies they have and work on a modular design ... make sure core code uses one or max two runtimes, make the runtimes modular ... as in, something tries to access the OS/2 runtime (silly example, I know), invite the user to download and install the OS/2 runtime ... leave it out for the rest of us.
In other words, they are not tackling the windows footprint in any way, they are leaving it the mess it is and try to talk others into using compression, maybe, or removing that restore image ...
Lets blame manufacturers for the bloat.
When I install latest Linux with all required whistles and bells, office suite and what have you, it uses about 1.5Gb - the last Windows version that could do better than that was Windows 2000.