What is the best way for harddisk partition on Vista?

I am going to get my laptop with Vista Ultimate with 160 GB harddrive soon. May I know what is the best way to partition to get better performance?

I am thinking of upgrade the ram to 2.5 gb, hence, I probably will partition a 5GB drive just to run page file. But is there any better idea? suggestion?

 

Delete the Vista partition, load XP

Seriously?...Depends on if you dual boot. But regardless I'd allocate about 20-40GB at the end of the disc for personal data (always a good idea to keep data separate from the main partition), then about 60-80GB for the main OS partition. What is left in the middle goes wherever you need it, be it more OS or data partition space, or a new partition for dual booting Linux/XP/etc.

 

Get a SSD Expresscard and keep all your data on that!

 

I don't know about you but they don't make SSD expresscards big enough for me.

I agree with night_2004. I have ~60 gb allocated to data on my laptop plus 2 external HDDs.

 

I'd say 60-80 GB for OS is overkill. If you don't keep like 10 games at once installed, that is. I would suggest rather 35-40GB for the OS, and then a larger data partition (say, 60% of the remaining space), and a smaller one at the end (say, 40% of the remaining space). You can then install another OS like XP on the last one (40%).

Do not make a separate pagefile partition, the advantages are minimal at best. Also, a 5GB swap file is unnecessary, most applications today will never even get close to using the 2.5GB so a 1GB swap should be more than enough.

 

Thanks, E.B.E.

If that's the case, I would split partition in 4 drives. 40GB for C drive/(Swap file)/60%/40%/

pagefile partition not good? What I heard is "Creating a separate partition for the swap file and modifying the setting for virtual memory will increase your overall computer performance." The recommended size for the new partition is 2.5 times your RAM size plus 500 Mb(eg: if you have 1GB of RAM the partition should have 3 GB)

http://www.windvis.com/using-a-partition-for-your-swap-file

 

Yes, but for myself I feel those indications about the pagefile are a bit outdated for most users.

Unless you do really memory-intensive stuff like editing huge image files (image-professional) I do not believe those indications really apply. Not even the latest games eat more than 2.5GB of memory together with the OS. I think you'll be OK with 1 or 1.5 GB of swap.

And about different swapfile partition... that comes from linux, on Windows I have run both ways (separate partition, and the same partition as the OS) and I have seen no performance difference whatsoever...

 

I don't know much about hard drive partitioning, as a matter of fact all this swap file mess went way over my head, but I do know that you should avoid recovery partitions, as well as too many partitions, many users are getting BSOD from those things.

 

The BSODs you refer to are Vista bugs, I think. Too many partitions is not inherently bad. But it can get confusing. For a regular user, I'd say 4 is many enough.

I wouldn't say "avoid a recovery partition". On ASUS ensemble notebooks, one cannot "Avoid" a recovery partition since it's there upon arrival. One can delete it, if one so wishes. Unless that space on the HDD is really needed, I don't recommend deletion since recovery from the partition takes around 10 minutes, and from the optical media it takes 3 to 5 hours.