[DTwice]

How much hard drive space should I allocate for Windows XP??

On a 160 GB HD

Regards

Daniel

[Dom]

10GB should be more than enough.

[Judas]

set the first partition to either 5gb for swapfile and second partition 10gb Windows XP and Program files (or vice versa for partitioning)

I also will suggest that you make a seperate partition specifically for games... ALWAYS...

download i'd also recommend a seperate swap file..

(personally, every computer i build usually has 4 parititions)

[riles9262]

10gig should be more than enough, and like Judas says, do another partition for the swap file.

[Turtle]

I set my XP partion at 7GB on my Raptor

[pr0digal jenius]

I have a Music partition, a Videos partition, a Swap partition, and a windows/apps partition...but once i overhaul mysystem this christmas, I will be adding a 'programs' partition and lettign windows have a few Gigs to itself

[Vampyromaniac]

10 GB is fine.

Originally Posted by pr0digal jenius

I have a Music partition, a Videos partition, a Swap partition, and a windows/apps partition...but once i overhaul mysystem this christmas, I will be adding a 'programs' partition and lettign windows have a few Gigs to itself

I have way too many partitions (but I'm in the middle of underconstructionness)

[Dom]

Originally Posted by Vampyromaniac

10 GB is fine.

I have way too many partitions (but I'm in the middle of underconstructionness)

Cool word.

[Ubergrendle]

I can appreciate the importance of partitions for filesystem management (and monitoring) in mission-critical environments (espeically Unix OSes), but is it really necessary for a home PC?

I know there's pagefiles for Photoshop and other video editing tools that recommend you set them on alternate drives for performance, but that's about it...I can't think of any other specific examples.

Is there a substantial performance benefit to more aggressively partitioning a large drive? I find the partitions usually end up being more of a hassle than they're worth...

[PangingJr]

the HDD partitioning is more interesting for organizational purposes than for performance in most home PC.

[mkk]

One could of course overdo the partitioning, but to at least separate the system files from the rest has many benefits. Just the simple ability to both easily and safely clean out the system part for a fresh operative installation without having to danger any of the other files has been reason enough to the non-techy home users that I've talked to. Defragmenting the system partition, the files in a system that really needs defrag attention for performance reasons, is also done much faster.

While certainly not necessary, a simple partitioning setup will usually be a timesaver in the long run.

[PangingJr]

PLANNING YOUR PARTITIONS
http://www.aumha.org/a/parts.htm
this's based on earlier Windows OS and much smaller partitions, but the principles are same.

[Sgt.Slug]

I've heard, 'put your swap on another partition' so many times it's not funny. I've done lots of testing etc(sisoft,3dmark etc), swap on another drive, these days, does very little as does partitioning your drive like crazy. I simply create folders. One for games, default for programs and a main download/storage folder. These are all tips from like Windows 98 years..not putting anyone down, but this is old antiquated and not overly effective tips for these modern times. Tweaking services and turning off stuff you don't need is the best thing you can do for windows. Defragging your hard disk(PerfectDisk) and allowing the program to re-organize your files can do wonders for your performance. Windows XP simply defrags. (you need to turn off the idle hd cleanup built into XP as well.) I used to do this swap on the other HD etc, I never really noticed anything in terms of performance. As such I have a supertweak registry file that I keep adding too to ensure that if I have to nuke my machine, or i want to, i can return to a near perfect tweaked machine.

[pr0digal jenius]

i do it for ease of organization mostly....but being a photopaint user, as well as adobe premier on occasion, I much prefer the swap partition

[Sgt.Slug]

Ya I do that kinda stuff too..I got 1GB of memory.. but it was funny working in Hammer the other day and it stated "You are running low on resources". Almost fell off my chair laughing..

How much ram you got? I can see what you mean about Premiere tho.. video editing is a different story, hehe. I be willing to wager a friendly bet that you wont be able to show a performance increase with swap on other drive. And what happens if your swap goes corrupt and you reboot your machine and windows gets hung before even loading windows? Never happen to you?

[PangingJr]

What was the stop error message when that happened ?

"Your system has no paging file or the paging file is too small...."

-Or-

"Windows created a temporary paging file on your computer ..."

or what?

[Judas]

i've done several machines sgt slug..... i mean ALOT of different configurations, and i gaurantee you that the efficiency of your machine will be increased a pile when you break up the entire hardrive into multiple partitions, It reduces the amount of fragmentation, reserves the faster portions of the hardrives for better preformance of high class files. File that don't require all the much bandwidth reside at the end. such as music file at the very end and video 2nd from....

Best setting may not be completely be the case, is setting the first partition as swap file, as if you have say, 3 partitions, 1 for swap, 1 for windows and program files, and the last for games.... setting the first as swap then windows then games... may actually introduce more lag in games then if you have windows, swap, games... why? because it's a shorter distance to travel to the swap file. Regaurdless of how much ram you may have, every game will use it, it can't get away from it.

for a machine with 2 hardrives.... you'll see a MASSIVE improvement with windows and games on the first and the swap on the second AS LONG AS both hardrives don't reside on the same IDE cable... (master/slave config)

[Vampyromaniac]

Originally Posted by Judas

for a machine with 2 hardrives.... you'll see a MASSIVE improvement with windows and games on the first and the swap on the second AS LONG AS both hardrives don't reside on the same IDE cable... (master/slave config)

I find that hard to swallow. What exactly do you mean by "you'll see a MASSIVE improvement?"

[Judas]

Originally Posted by Vampyromaniac

I find that hard to swallow. What exactly do you mean by "you'll see a MASSIVE improvement?"

massive is, if you running relatively slow hardrives to begin with... saw 2mb cache HDs on ATA 133 or less.... you'll see a pretty definite drop in windows boot time, program load time... games load time.... not to mention nearly removes every possible stutter conceived of in any game "within reason"

also, i've seen such a massive improvement using one single hardrive on it's own ide cable with windows and games... and then 2 hardrives on there own ide cables.. both master.. in RAID 0 with the first partition 5gb.... that i could actually encode video and nearly twice the rate i could.... ZERO dropped frames... (got dropped frames before)

file transfer speeds when opening certain compressed files... playing games that seem to have this issue with loading everything to the page file no matter how much ram there is....

it's pretty impressive....

I just made a rig with a 166mhz p1... 1 6.4 gb hd on ide 1 and a 2.2gb on ide 2 as slave (with DVD-ROM as master).... and the bootup time was actually cut by 2/3rds easily.... overall system/windows was much improved.....even for being that both HDS are only PIO MODE 4 supported....