Hard Drive Partitions

[bernouli]

Sometime early next year I will be building a new system. The system will likely have one large hard drive. As of now I will be installing XP Pro. I was curious how everyone else splits up their drive. How big of a partition is generally created for the OS. And do most people partition the remaining space.

Now a file architecture question. When non OS applications (games, utilities, MS Office, etc.) are installed do most people put then in D:\Program Files\ …. Or create separate sub-folders for the broad categories and install them in the appropriate sub folder.

Thanks

 

[g-paw]

There is almost an unlimited number of ways to partition and it's pretty much up to you which works best. First put the OS and programs of the first. When you ever have to do of Windows you'll have to reinstall the programs anyway so there really isn't any reason to put them on a different partition. For XP 35GB to 40GB should be more than enough if you're saving everything to another partition. As to how many storage partitions this really has to do with organizing your data, e.g., on my work computer I have 2 storage partitions, one for my work and one for everything else. On my wife's PC and laptop I have one storage because any more and she would be to confused to use either If you edit video and can't afford a separate drive strictly for video, dedicating a partition to video would be a could idea. Like I said, how many storage partitions comes down to what works for you. Would recommend Partition Magic. Let's you partition after you install Windows, resize any time, and a lot of other disk management stuff, really worth the money. Resizing and creating partitions is especially important especially when starting out because you'll likely want to try different configurations