So I've just finished setting up several Win7 beta 1 VM's that I will be testing with. I had assumed that a 10GB hard drive would be enough for the limited testing I will be doing; however a 2.4 GB iso file would become almost 7GB installed. I doubt that many people are still using 10 GB hard drives but, if Microsoft is really targeting netbooks and low cost systems it may be a good idea to slim down the install image a bit more before going gold.

I would like to point out that telnet is missing from Windows 7 (this is also true on Windows Vista.) Last support call I was on I asked this very question to Microsoft, the reason given was to limit the installed operating systems footprint. They removed a very useful ~700KB program, boy am I glad they are trying to keep the size down.