Archived from groups: microsoft.public.windowsxp.customize (
More info?)
francis gérard - typed:
> "Lemon Jelly" <hhh@aaa.com> wrote in message
> news:u7Za2PsgEHA.536@TK2MSFTNGP11.phx.gbl...
>>
>> I don't have any issues regarding your advice concerning PF placement
>> which is largely mirrored in the already quoted Alex N article but I
>> do have with the quoted para. One analogy that sticks in my mind is
>> likening a hard disc to a house. You can have everything in one big
>> room which a file system such as NTFS will allow without the
>> pitfalls that FAT32 can have. Different users can have their own
>> cupboards to store their own stuff etc. Now say you want to
>> re-decorate or replace the carpet - you have to shuffle everything
>> around. Now divide that single living space up into rooms according
>> to purpose. The occupants now have the option to share certain rooms
>> & have their own private space. Keeping one's data on the OS
>> partition is if not actually dangerous,
>> not a brilliant idea. You OS starts acting up which requires
>> reinstalling. You have to then move all your (& possibly others)
>> data to another location before reformatting. OK, this is an extreme
>> case where reformatting is required but at the very least of having
>> one extra partition for personal data has to make sense.
>>
>> I've moved virtually everything except the hibernate file off the OS
>> partition to others on the same physical disc or a 2nd one. If I
>> mess up the OS or want completely uninstall a certain application, I
>> simply overwrite my C drive with a previous image (stored on a
>> different partition of course) & after 20 mins, I'm back up &
>> running without my own data or settings being touched. There are
>> also performance gains in using multiple volumes such as reducing
>> fragmentation. I even installed most apps to another partition but
>> usually restore both together to stop stuff getting out of sync. Old
>> school?
>
> your points are well-made, paul, for the most part, i agree, and that
> is how i might setup a single drive system as well, depending on the
> size, speed, etc of the hard drive in question. in my previous
> article, regarding the multi-HDD system, i had made the assumption
> that the user's data would be stored on a different physical drive,
> not on the same one as the OS was installed on. in the case of a
> multi-HDD system, it would be better to store valuable user data on a
> separate physical drive (not the same one as the OS is installed on),
> which precludes the need for creating separate partitions on each
> drive. but then there is the issue of moving user data from the
> Windows' default locations to a different drive, Windows embeds and
> buries user data all over the system drive, and although not a
> problem for geeks like us, moving it all to a new location is usually
> beyond the scope of the average user. when i said, 'old school' i
> was referring to the old days when it was necessary to chop-up the
> drive into tiny partitions since earlier versions of windows couldn't
> access partitions larger than, what was it, 4GB or something like
> that. there are some people who still have that mindset, and chop-up
> their drives into small partitions, as a way of organizing their
> data. to my way of thinking, that is old-school... that's what
> directories are for. organizing your programs onto a different
> partition is also a good idea, but only if you can restore the
> registry dependencies in the event of a crash/restore on the system
> drive, not to mention all the shared .dll library files that 3rd
> party software installs into the \windows\system32\ and \Program
> Files\Common Files\ directories. it is possible to change the
> location of the \Program Files\Common Files\ directory, through the
> %CommonProgramFiles% environment variable, but again, beyond the
> scope of most users, and that doesn't address the problem of missing
> (program) files from the \system32\ directory should the operating
> system require reinstallation.
> anyway, as you say, data is better stored in a separate partition
> from the operating system, or better still, stored on a separate
> physical (data) drive.
Thanks for the clarification Francis. As an aside, my quest to move
anything that could be moved off the OS volume got a little less
obsessive when I realised that moving the entire Documents & Settings
folder was peppered with problems to do after, rather than when
installing XP & when I realised that separating the OS & parts of the
registry hive wasn't such a bright idea, I lost even more interest in
doing so.
Regarding where Windows keeps settings, it took me quite a while to
figure out that IE6's history was partly stored in the registry (date
info) & the URLs in a user folder. As long as XP is bootable, I can run
a batch file to later restore even that - Drive Image was worth every
penny!
--
Paul
(Who is a happy bunny again, having sorted OE-Quotefix to work with
SP2!)
, and Windows is on C:, the pagefile can be moved from C: to either 
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