Partition? or to not?

Placebo

Hey
My computers HD came partitioned into 2, around 110 gb each, and windows XP is installed in the first partition. Im thinking of a fresh install. Would it help windows and generally - seek speed wise if i deleted the partitions and installed windows.


another question, is it better to install an APPLICATION [eg:adobe suite] on same drive as windows [as i purchased a new HD and it just seems faster at the moment [RPM is the same] - but theres always some files that get installed where windows is located etc]

conzy

Its good practice to keep windows on its own partition, while keeping documents on another... This way when you need to reinstall windows, you wont lose your files..

My current setup:

74gig Raptor:

4gig Swap / Pagefile
70gig remainder for Windows programs and some games

500gig WD:

I have this set as "My Documents" and pretty much everything is stored here along with games that i wouldnt play as regularly, If you right click on the My documents shortcut in the startbar you can change its location... This is handy as all the My music and My pictures shortcuts stay intact..

160gig Samsung:

Some more storage and some backups of importnat things from the other drives..

Programs work fine if they arent on the same partition as windows, and you can change the Default Program files path in the registery too, so by default programs will install to G:\ProgramFiles instead of C:\ProgramFiles for example...

Another advantage of keeping programs on another drive is, you can make an image of your windows partition, with Acronis True image or something, and when you restore the image all of your programs will still work..

Placebo

thanks conzy, very useful info there.

Just interms of this
I have 2 drives

Drive A = 2 partitions
Drive B = il put all docs here

Should i delete A's partitions completely and give room to windows? will performance increase at all?

Capt'n Midnight

if you can, put the swap file as close to the start of the physical disk as possible ie. in the first partition and put it on the other drive to the one where the files you use most will be. On one system I've setup a 2GB partition for swap file ahead of the windows partition so it would be nice and fast. If you wanted to dual boot to a prehistoric OS like DOS / win95 / NT that could only see 2GB then put that partition at the start of the drive, and a static sized swap file there too.

a clean install will speed up things,
rather than deleting a partition you could resize it (after backing up all data )

Placebo

Thanks CM.
im trying to delete this partition D, diskpart wont let me do it, any idea?

Capt'n Midnight

make sure you have no swap file or hibernation file on
try safe mode too

Donny5

A large swap file won't help much, unless you get the task bar notification "Windows is running low on Virtual Memeroy". Otherwise, you are just encourage Windows to page to the HDD, which will slow things down. Remember, there's no point in freeing up RAM if you aren't going to use it.

Capt'n Midnight

D'oh
Actually you are right there for XP, having no swap file would be faster. But if you run out of memory you're looking at a restart. But you need the reg tweak too and 1GB of RAM realistically

A fixed swap file at the start of the driver would be next fastest, Pagedfrg on technet can defrag it but not too fast doing so

Placebo

thanks guys, i have 3GB of ram,
i had to use partition magic, merged all 3 partitions in C: , and installed windows on that, all data etc goes in D.

took a while !! formatted NFTS , not the quick one, hopefully got rid of any empty spaces