Maximum PC

Hello Everyone,

Just built my first system - going to try and install Win XP Home w/ SP1 tonight. I have a single 160GB SATA drive and machine will mostly be used for gaming. Should I partition the drive at all? I understand that XP does better with a single partition?

James

i would...i like to do:
C: windows insall
D: biggest: move the "my Docs", "my [insert thing here]" to this drive.
also install all games into this one, not Program Files.
basically leave the C drive to its self
E: all the swap file here. figure out how much you want it to be, then load it all here.


i have found that to work well

multiple partition is the way to go. definitely multi-partition your hdd. lets say you multi-partition your hdd into drive C and drive D. drive C is where windows is installed and drive D is where you movies, mp3z, and programs are installed.

lets say you need to reformat your C drive because of a certain mlicious virus. through the benefits of multi-partitioning, you only need to reformat your C drive. you dont need to touch the D drive at all.

by having a single partition, if you need to reformat, you need to reformat everything and install everything over again and it can get pretty tedious.

On a single drive solution, I would partition separately for the OS and data. As mentioned, this makes OS reinstalls go much more smoothly should you want to start over or something becomes corrupt.

Keep in mind that anything of importance you'll want a backup solution outside of that drive, whether it be another hard drive, CDs, DVDs, etc.

With a single 160GB HD how large would you suggest I make the partition for Win XP Home? The largest partition would be for games and perhaps one other small partition for everything else.

For strictly an OS, 10-15g would be PLENTY. A WinXP takes only a few gigs, and you'd have ample room left over for Office (if you're installing it), antivirus, firewall, and other odds and ends.

When creating the partitions how does FDISK assign them? In other words is "C" on the outer or inner partiton of the disk? I understand that there is some marginally better performance as far as reading etc. on the inner partition?

So basically whatever the OS installs initially goes on "C" and everything after that you put on another drive?

I opted for a single partition becaue of the way Windows organzines files on the disk - partitioning kind of nulls the benefits from what I read.

i think u will regret that. every time i install windows, i do it with at least 2 partitions, 1 for windows and programs, and 1 for storage. that way, when windows eventually craps out, it makes it a lot easier to reinstall without having to backup everything. but hey, ur choice ...

That will work well, but keep in mind that it won't give you any noticable performance gain by having the swapfile separated. It will give you a marginal boost in that your pagefile will never (theoretically) get fragmented, but that's it, and it's a negligible issue on a huge drive.

If you want the best performance for your swap file, an old IDE drive would actually probably be better (or a RAID).

I know that is what I was afraid of as well, but I have one XP machine that has been running stable now for 2+ years and hoping that trend continues with the new machine. Can't wait for SP2!

I guess the best thing is to really have more then one drive RAID or no. But budget concerns limited me to one 160GB SATA drive.

The secret is to keep windows running good.

I've had the same Windows install on here for almost 3 years now with no major issues and very few BSODs (I could probably count them all on one hand).

Should the need to reinstall ever arise (knock on wood), I have a 2nd HDD I can backup any important data to.

I ran the utilities in System Suite at least a few times a month on the older machine (P4 2.25GHz) which I think helped a lot - along with XP just being a lot better of an OS.

Swithced to System Mechanic for the new machine (Athlon 64 3000) and so far I am happy with it, but am having some issues with the firewall.

You dont really need those. Here's what I use:

Disk Cleanup at least once a month.
AVG FREE eddition full system scan every night (auto-updated)
Spybot S&D at least once a week (although it hasnt been updated in I dont know how long because it never finds any...)
Disk Defragmenter 7.0 every night
Plus a good firewall running 24/7 (I use ZA free edition)

Im sure there are other things you can do, but this has worked well for me for the entire time I have had it.

Sounds very similar to my software setup, with the addition of ad-aware and a couple of version variations.

In addition to preventative maintainence and protection, it's worth mentioning preventative computing habits as well. If you're haphazardly DLing via P2P and practice wreckless web surfing, a borked Windows install is only a matter of time