This question was inspired by Bob's comment to my answer here.

On boot, windows writes files to the hard drive (I imagine this to be the case, as it has a way of detecting if the boot was previously interrupted by a hard power-off, and I am sure many other things).

But assuming that there is a "smooth" boot, where there are no error, etc, and no logon scripts that run, and things like that, about how much (a few KB, a few MB, a few GB) data gets written to the drive?

For simplicity's sake, assume that:

• hibernation is turned off
• windows 7
• pagefile is turned off (does this matter right at boot, or only later?)

How could one go about measuring this? Are there resources that have this information?