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    Dell i9300 Hard Drive Partition?

    Discussion in 'Dell' started by LapDriver, Apr 12, 2005.

  1. LapDriver

    LapDriver Notebook Enthusiast

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    I recently reinstalled my xp and drivers on my new i9300. I did it more then once during a one week period :(. I decided to just keep one (NTFS) partition. I have been told that having your OS on a seperate partition (6-7 gigs) is a good idea, security wise. Well since i have put my HD through more then one reinstall, i was wondering if i could just use the Microsoft System restore utility (to get rid of the the applications and software that are there now) and use some sort of "Partition Manager" or whatever to put the "original/clean" OS in a seperate drive?...Is that possible?..or should i just do one more FINAL reinstall and not worry bout HD durability?........Im such a newbie!

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    *Dell Inspiron 9300
    - Pentium M 1.67ghz
    - 60gb HD (7200prm)
    - 512mb ddr RAM
    - 256mb Nvidia Go 6800
     
    LapDriver, Apr 12, 2005
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  2. JustJimDelany

    JustJimDelany Notebook Consultant

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    Well one thing to consider is that the beginning of the drive is about twice as fast as the end of the drive so ... It is a giant benefit to get the page (virtual size) file as close to the begining of the drive as possible. This is a good reason to buy 2 drives for a desktop machine and after formatting the second drive immediately move the page file to it and force it to be a big as you can ever imagine using. This makes a huge difference assuming a real memory size smaller than actually used (hard to imagine it not being these days even with memory sizes as they are)

    Also assuming a large disk drive you can gain some benefit by partitioning the drive in 2 something like 2/3 1/3 I would use that last 1/3 as a filing cabinet. For me for instance the I do software development, the samples and help are giagantic, I thought about placing them on the second 1/3 drive as I don't use all of that stuff all that much and I don't care if accessing it is slow. I want the disk space used to run the development tools and holding the program to be as fast as possible.

    You will have to evaluate your case. If you want to truck around stuff you hardly look at but want it faster / more convenient than cd / dvd do that.

    Personally I don't see much advantage to cutting the disk just for the os other than it accentuates what I have already said about speed, you would force EVERYTHING out onto the slower part of the disk or everything else at least depending on how you install things.

    Hope this helps.

    I9300 2.0ghz 1.0gb ram 100gb disk 256MB NVIDIA 6800 dvd rw UXGA Bluetooth Intel WiFi Media Center
     
    JustJimDelany, Apr 12, 2005
    #2