Separate partitioning? OS/Programs/Data

I'm getting a new laptop soon and I am considering partitioning my hard drive like this:
One partition for the Windows 7 OS
One partition for any programs I will install
One partition for the rest of my data
There is only one 320 GB HD @ 7200 rpm.

What are the benefits of partitioning the HD? Would it make it slower because the files are all over the place?

Do you think I should keep the OS and programs separate, or together on one partition?

Also, recommendations of the sizes of the partitions are very welcome.

 

I don't really think its necessary to seperate OS/data. Now like movie files, .iso files, office files (word, powerpoint), music, etc... that would be a different story, i would maybe keep that in a different partition.

 

I've tried doing that before, and generally speaking it works. The primary benefit, of course, is that if the OS goes bad and you need to reinstall, you won't have to wipe your data.

Having programs on a separate partition might seem like a nice, orderly way to put things; however, installed programs put a lot of their goodies into the windows registry, and that set of files would be lost in any reinstallation of the OS, unless you're restoring from a recent clone or image you took of the OS partition (tho' you'd still lose anything that was added to the registry after the clone/image was made). If that happened, a lot of your installed programs would end up being effectively orphaned, or even bollixed up enough to cause a crash, so you'd end up having to reinstall a lot of your programs as well. For that reason, it seems to be that you really don't gain a lot by putting your programs on a partition separate from the OS. Putting your data on a separate partition, however, does make sense.

 

Could you not just copy your registry... Or at least the program portion of it...

 

Oh, and I forgot about the swap file. Should I make a separate partition for the swap file? Would that slow it down, since they are on the same physical HD?

I am also planning on installing linux on the computer. that would be another partition. Am I going a little OCD with partitions? lol

 

registries cannot simply be copied from one machine to another or (generally) between hard drives. The various GUID bytes need to be intelligently shifted/changed to reflect their new home and host. Some disk managers claim to be able to do this.

In practice it's easier/more reliable to reinstall the msft OS and apps. If your disk manager makes one mistake you can be left with an unbootable disk.

Reinstalling while time consuming (depending on how you do it) is in fact known to be reliable.