Bare-minimum hard drive space to install Windows XP SP3 Professional?

"2 Go seem more than enough for a poweruser *

Note : everything is in another partition so my documents and another Program files is maded in that second partition, that include also various downloads folders and a backup folder ..."

"The default Windows XP installation requires approximately 1300MB (ex. drivers, pagefile and hiberfil).

Of course, that can be reduced significantly with utilities such as nLite (better results but unforgiving, you don't get it right it's back to the drawing board) or XPLite (you can restore removed components with a few mouse clicks). Here's a screenshot of an installation on my Eee 701 4GB where disk space is a scarce commodity!"

probably just about 2 gig. Windows XP SP1 disk says it needs 2 gig, SP2 probably a bit more, same with SP3 to be safe, I would give it 5

"update:

if you streamline the service pack 3, and remove things like media player, internet explorer (you will download firefox anyway), etc... it installs at 1.45GB. (more than windows xp SP2 including media center and IE)

to make a small installer you need to use nLite which is free-ware.

the process of removing unneeded portions of windows is painful, but you can remove a Gb from the final install (and 300mb from the installation disk!). here is the preset i use so you don't have to read all the thousands of options on nlite: profile.ini (import as a preset on nlite)"

I'd use about 6-8 gigs for a minimum size myself. This will give you 2 gigs for the install, another 2 gigs for the swap file (if on the same disk), and about 2-4 gigs for patches/temp files/miscelaneous needs.