One significant (and annoying) difference I have noticed between Windows
and Linux is that Windows seems to grow over time. It's not *completely*
Windows' own fault, but for the most part it is.

  Something like a half year ago I had 10 GB of free space in my C: drive.
Today I had less than 4 GB, and I had to do some serious cleanup to regain
that space again. (I always install all games and most programs to my D:
drive. I only install the most critical system tools and such in the C:
drive. The ones I have installed in the past 6 months certainly don't take
6 GB of space.)

  It wasn't any one single file or program. It was the sum of a ton of
little things.

  Every time Windows installs an update or service pack, it writes the
necessary info inside the \WINDOWS directory to uninstall it. Since there
are hundreds of such updates, these directories end up taking a rather
significant amount of space, even though individually they are relatively
small. I think they took over half a GB in total. They can be safely
removed if you are OK with not being able to uninstall the updates and
service packs (I have never heard of anybody doing that; certainly I have
never encountered the need).

  Every time Windows installs a new version of .NET, it writes a huge amount
of files to the C: drive. These are important files and cannot be removed
(unless you really want to uninstall .NET, making many programs not work).
There's little that can be done to remedy this problem, other than making
NTFS compress those directories (which saves about 20-30% of the disk space
they take).

  There are tons of temporary files which are *not* removed by Windows' disk
cleaning utility. You have to manually search for them and remove them.
Those alone accounted for several tens of megabytes.

  Every time you install a program, even if you don't install it in C:,
Windows will write uninstallation info for that program in the C: drive.
AFAIK there's no way around it. The only way to remove them safely is
to remove the program itself.

  Also, many programs (especially games) want to write tons of data
under the "Documents and Settings" directory in the C: drive. AFAIK there's
no way to change this. Most programs write just a few megabytes, but some
of them write really huge amounts of (mostly useless) data in there. What's
worse, many of the programs don't remove the data when they are uninstalled.
This alone easily accounts for a gigabyte of useless data, or even more.

  Every time any part of Java updates itself, it feels the need to leave
its old files in their place, and install the new files in new directories
(under C:, naturally). This easily accounts for hundreds of megabytes.

  And so on. There are tons of things which make the C: partition grow,
even if you try to avoid it. If the C: partition is relatively small, you
are going to run out of space sooner or later.

  I have never noticed this phenomenon in Linux. It doesn't grow over time,
even if you regularly install and uninstall programs.

  The somewhat equivalent of "Documents and Settings" in Linux (and in Unix
in general) is your home directory, but programs don't tend to write tons
of data there (except Firefox and Thunderbird, but cleaning their caches
is easy enough). Even if some programs do write tons of data there, it's
somehow easier to find that data and remove it if you don't need it anymore.
It's more hidden and somehow more "silent" in Windows.

  But the point is that program data tends to keep confined inside your
home directory (inside subdirectories starting with a dot), rather than
being scattered all over the system. I have so far not found the need to
clean up my Linux system, while I have found the need to do so with my
Windows system several times because of space running alarmingly low.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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