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Suggestions for partitioning HD for XP


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#1
jdtice

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I have searched, and I'm sure the answer is simple but I will ask anyways.

I just bought a Dell 600m laptop with a 40 gb drive and could not opt out of an OS. Well, I own XP so I was planning to install my own OS anyways. I noticed in the windows setup that they had 3 partitions. The first and third did not do anything, and were very small. The OS was installed on the second partition with the drive letter C.

My question is, should I partition my HD in a fashion similar to this, or should I just make one large partition? Are there any sites or threads on this forum that suggest ways to setup the partitions for a Windows XP install?

TIA
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#2
AlexR

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It all depends, some people swear by having a dedicated partition for windows, about 3 gig should be fine. This allows you to save any important work or settings for programs to another partition of the HD in case you have to reinstall windows, but you're going to have to reinstall the apps anyway in that case and you may notice a hit in access speeds. It's up to you and what you're used to working with. You'll also need to change the installation path for everything you install to the other partitions. If you backup regularly anyway then there's no problem with having one partition for everything.

Edited by AlexR, 29 April 2005 - 02:31 AM.

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#3
jdtice

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Yea I plan to keep my apps on one partition. But is there a benefit to leaving say 40 mb in the beginning of the drive, before the primary partition which windows gets installed to?

Also, is it pointless to have a separate partition for your pagefile?
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#4
AlexR

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Not, that'll only slow Windows down. Keep the pagefile on the same drive or partition as windows, then it doesn't have to look at any tables to find cached data.
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