Member Avatar for Drumstik

I just purchased a new 160 gig hard drive. What is the best way to configure the hard drive. A friend of mine suggested the following:
20 gig - Drive C Windows operating system only
5 gig swapfile
Remainder for files and applications

I'm no expert, but here is my comuter info:

Intel Pentium 4. 3.0GHz Socket-478. 800 FSB CPU

PC 3200 512/slot

I have 1gig of memory. but not for sure what all of this means. is what I have good?

Does anybody know what services are safe to disable or set to manual? Also, what recommendations to use as far as turning off themes, using a screen saver, power setting options, i want to get the best optimization possible.

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Member Avatar for jwenting

Use one partition only.
It makes no sense creating multiple partitions. Your friend was probably thinking about performance when he advised you to create a separate partition for your pagefile but this is useless (in fact it may well be counterproductive).
Had he told you to use a separate harddrive he'd have been correct.

Your machine is quite good. As you don't tell what videocard you have I can't say anything about that :)

Member Avatar for Catweazle

Disagree strongly.

* Use a partition for Windows. 10Gb is enough, but use more if you want.
* Have a dedicated partition for program installations. You'll keep them unfragmented and responsive by doing so. Alter the default program installation directory to point to that dedicated partition.
* Have another partition or partitions for data storage. Shift 'My Documents' to there.

I'd agree that having a dedicated partition for the pagefile is an absolute waste of time for 99.999% of people. I'd also suggest that disabling services falls into the same category. Visit Black Viper's website if you insist on playing around with Services, but be advised that this is a 'geeky' thing to do, which may cause problems, and which most likely will show no performance improvement.

Member Avatar for oalee

I agree with Catweazl, 10Gb of space for windows is enough but I'd suggest you upsize it a bit up to 20Gb. It's always better to separate all your data files from your system files, this way, it makes reformatting and re-installation of your OS safer and easier.

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