Vista Ultimate Re-Installation Woes

Okay I got my HP Pavillion DV2025 with 2GB RAM and I added a 160GB Hard drive. What is the best way to install vista ultimate. What is the best partition scheme that will give me optium peformance. I will be running MS OFFICE 2007, THE SIMS 2, THE SIMS2 PETS, also running Civilization IV. I will actually run the sims2 with all the expansion packs. Please help me out here.

 

Well I have vista ultimate on a 160GB 5400RPM HDD on my dv6000t and here's my partition system:

C: 39GB (~40GB)

-Vista Ultimate
-MS Office 2007 Enterprise
-All of HP's drivers and stuff

D: 109GB (~110GB)

-Personal Data, everything else, software

Total: ~150GB (formatted)

So far no problems, the C drive is down to 12.5GB after the installation of everything but that's plenty. Hope this helps.

 

Unless you have multiple hard drives, multiple partitions are not useful. A laptop is more likely to fail or be stolen than for Windows to corrupt a partition, so partitioning isn't too useful. It does NOT increase performance. It also will NOT help when Windows is corrupted if you intend on installing programs to a different partition. Program installs are pretty much tied to a Windows install and are NOT transferable.

So save yourself the trouble and stick to 1 partition. Things work out much easier that way in the end.

 

I'd use two...though I'd make your OS partition much larger and keep all your programs on it too.

Keep your data on a separate partition...you have no idea how many times I've had to reinstall an OS and have to transfer all my data to another device just because I didn't use multiple partitions. My data partition is about 30GB, my XP partition around 40, and about 80 for Vista.

 

As long as you reserve it for data anyway. But still, it's much better to have data backed up to a place that's NOT on your laptop. Always, always, always should be the case.

 

Normally I'd agree with dagamer on the multiple partitions, but I try out a lot of software both beta and of dubious quality and I don't want to mess around too much with the Windows partition if I need to uninstall or modify the software, so I normally reserve the Windows partition for the critical software and install other nonessential stuff on the secondary partition along with my data.

 

I have a 160gb HD I installed it with only 1 partition and it runs great

 

I posed the quesiton because of the follwoing:

I had it installed with 1 partition and it ran okayl.

When i switched 2 2 partitions my programs seem to read faster (start faster) from the other partition. My original scheme was 1 partition 40gb for the Operating System then I had the rest for programs.... My data is saved to external devices.

Now I use an imaging program and had an image of the Operating System before any software installs so that in the event of an emergnecy or crash I could restore to a clean image of just the Operating System and drivers..(I must make note that the images are kept on an external 500GB hard drive and as a precaution on several DVD's) I image the OS because from what I have read after you activate vista ultimate if you re-install it may ask to activate again and I don't want to get burned by Microsoft not wanting to activate my OS.. I paid close to $325 bucks for Vista Ultimate and its messed up that I may have issues with activation if I got a new hard drive or somethign.

Back to what I was saying..... I ran some speed tests on the hard drive reads and writes and when the os is on a separte partition from the software applicaions the application run (they start faster)

I just wanted a good scheme as far as partition sizes.

Don't know why that guy said it makes no difference. Especially when I play the Sims it ran considreably faster with 2 partitions as opposed to one giant partition. Can someone help me out here.

 

In all honesty, any perceived speed improvement from having two partitions on your laptop is either imagined or purely accidental. Real speed gains are made by having multiple drives.

And installing applications of dubious quality to an alternate partition only helps you a little but not very much. Most applications will install shared resources to your Windows partition whether you like it or not. And let's not forget how many apps muck with your registry or don't completely uninstall later on. Multiple partitions won't help you there either.

Back in the bad old days of early hard drive technology and ancient Windows 3.1, 95, 98 there were "ideal" or better ways to partition due to physical, logical and programmatic limitations. Today these largely don't exist.

I'm not saying that using multiple partitions is a bad idea; I have been using the 2 partition approach for years after being burned by forgetting to move my data to a safe location before blowing away the boot partition and clean installing Windows. Keeping your data safe should always be your first priority.

That said, you can keep your data safe in a one partition scenario (which is really the way Windows is designed for), you just need to locate your data on another computer and/or have a reasonable backup scheme.

Richard

 

Well I just checked my speeds with a benchmark program and when I got the numbers back it showed that using 2 partitions actually gained me a speed and/or performance increase of 2.1 % granted this is not much. Now here is my dielema: .... Lets say I go with the 1 partition... I already have the image of my Vista Ultimate saved on the external hard drive. If I install this image will I have to re-activate Windows Vista Ultimate. Right now my only worry is weather my Vista Activation will be messed up when I do this.

 

Yea, 2.1% is pretty much negligible.

But I say go with the configuration that works best for you, single or dual partition.

As far as activation goes, well, this is pretty sticky. In the past I have never had any problems with reactivation but a couple days ago I rebuilt both my laptop and desktop more than a couple times due to crappy drivers. I have 2 separate retail PIDs, one for each. I had no problems with the laptop but on my desktop, Vista deactivated itself (due to a new driver install and re-enumeration of my hard disks). When I went to reactivate Vista and it said that the PID was already used. No! Really? Anyway, Microsoft issued me a new PID and I'm back up and running again.

So, my guess is that if you already activated Vista and then imaged your HD, and now you are putting the image back on your HD you should be ok. However, your mileage may vary.

Richard