Vista size

[ingeborgdot@yah]

I just want a concensus to the size of everyones partition for vista. I am going to dual boot xp pro and vista 64. I made xp 45gb because I will not be putting a lot of info on that partition. I was wondering what you thought a good size for vista will be? I was thinking around 100-120gb. I have many large programs to install like adobe CS3, office 07, etc that take up a lot of space. I want to future proof it for size. What is your take on this?
I have seen some people say 20gb. Do you not put anything on this partition? That seems so small.

[scru]

yeh that's pretty good. My Vista partition is 112 GB. I have that CS3 suite installed, Office Home and Student 07, Encarta Student, VS C# Express 2008 and C++ Express 2008, the general "must-have" programs like Winrar and Firefox among others, and some gigs in downloads and documents / files. I still have about 40 odd gigs left free on C:

Although, you should note that I have a different partition for media, which can gobble up free-space quite fast if you plan on having any.

[ingeborgdot@yah]

With the two hdd I plan on xp on 45gb, ? on vista yet and left over space on this same drive as music. The other 500gb hdd will be documents, video, and pics etc.

[scru]

If it's just music you should be fine. But if you're like me and use MCE to record shows and are just too lazy to transcode them, be prepared to sacrifice an entire disk to them. Right now I'm in the process of getting a 500GB drive cuz my current media drive is full.

Also, I would advise you pre-plan how you are going to partition those drives beforehand, and make sure you have an allowed configuration in mind. When I was partitioning mine I jumped right into it and didn't know there was a limit to each different types of partition, and that only certain configurations were allowed. As a result I have 18GB of unpartitioned space because I can't be bothered to repartition that drive again (partly for fear of data loss, and the rest because I'm too plain lazy).

[Infarction]

Just to give you an idea, my laptop has a 100GB hard drive (well, 87 after marketing scams and a recovery partition), and with Vista Ultimate, VS 2008 Team Suite, Office 2007 Ultimate, a handful of other small programs and about 25GB of music I still have 15GB left over.

[ingeborgdot@yah]

I have 3 partitions on my main drive and only one on the other. My vista is at 50gb as I am only putting the os and several small apps on this drive. All the other apps are on my other separate drive. My problem is that somehow the vista drive keeps filling up and I don't know why. I can't find anything that is adding up to 41gb that it says it is full of. Where could it be?

[bobbyraw]

i suggets no less that 100G for vista Microsoft suggest 40 for ultimate, but base on what you plan to run and bare in mind the pagefile it will create.

[ingeborgdot@yah]

I have only small programs on the C: drive. I have found a 14gb temp folder in windows. Can I not move the page file?

[bobbyraw]

yeah you can locate the page file to a different drive that what the opeating system is installed on

[ingeborgdot@yah]

I had talked to people and so many have made vista only 40gb or even less. What am I doing wrong that I have this happening? I also found a file called winsxs. It is packed with amd64 stuff. Does everyone have this?

[bobbyraw]

you can make it 40G but what else are you planning to install, this temp folder in window sthats 14g, you can delete the files, they are just remnants from installed programs. most willl never be used again. as for the AMD 64 stuff in the winsxs directory i would assume it had to deal with the type of processor you are using and the file are there in the event yo are actually running 64bit applications throught the proccessor.

[ingeborgdot@yah]

I just built a new machine with an intel Q6600. Not amd.

[Infarction]

System restore points take up a ton of disc space. I found 7GB of them on my 2 week old laptop the other day. Open the disk cleanup wizard, go to the More Options tab, and hit the button for System Restore and Shadow Copies. Hopefully that'll be your jackpot... :)

[Infarction]

I had talked to people and so many have made vista only 40gb or even less. What am I doing wrong that I have this happening? I also found a file called winsxs. It is packed with amd64 stuff. Does everyone have this?

The sxs stands for side-by-side. This is to aid you in running 64-bit and 32-bit stuff at the same time.

[ibach]

Many of people do it all wrong.

I did a test installing xp 32, xp 64 and vista 64 systems on separate drives with all the same software (office 2007, adobe cs4, autocad 2009, 3dsmax 2009 ect. all full installs)

it came out that after installing only clean os vista took hell a lot of a space, around 25GB
(for comparison xp 32 took about 4GB with all updates and netframework 3.5 ect)

BUT,

after installing all the software to both systems vista ended up at about 37 GB (shadow coping turned off) and xp 32 was at about 50GB.

It turns out that vista has much better way of storing dll files installed by other software so installation of the whole system is not growing so rapidly.

Install vista and all the software you need on the same drive and size will grow slowly.

(if you install games it is good idea to install them on a separate drive because they get fragmented very fast and install a lot of media files thus taking a lot of space that vista cannot compensate for.)

Leaving all other media files, e-mail folder, and user files on the other disk (and i mean separate disk, not only partition, if possible) is a great idea.
That is very important if OS is installed on a raid 0 disk (which is generally great) because it's hard to get data back from corrupted raid field.

Use raid 0 disks for OS and for files you are currently working at, and back it up on non raid disk. That ll speed up everything.

Separate OS partition from user files you are working at at the moment on the same disk, different partition or separate disk (better).

You can separate paging file on an other partition too, but if you have enough RAM that is not necessary (gain in speed is small).

defragment disks !!!

[jbennet]

My Windows Server 2008 install with visual studio, sdks etc... comes to just under 40gb.

45 or 50gb is just about okay for a developer machine

Vista/2008 supports resizing partitions natively so if its not enough, it can shrink your xp one and expand itself into that space.

[ingeborgdot@yah]

What is the process in vista to resize the partition of the vista os? I have a dual boot with xp and never use the xp. I don't want to get rid of it but have over 35gb of space left on that partition.

[ibach]

couple of examples of partitioning for vista x64 sorted by costs (number of hard drives installed)

-Best:
1# drive: Raid0 field, 2x60 GB (or more depending of software you'll install)
OS and all the software is installed on this disk (accept big games as said before)
2# drive: Raid0 field, 2x60 GB (or more according to your needs)
Used only for OS paging file, and temporary working folders of other programs using a lot of memory.
3# drive: Raid0 field, 2x60 GB (or more according to your needs) only for files you are working on right now.
4# drive: non raid drive as big as need be for storage of files

backup: backup device for all those drives (about the same size as all the drives together, external, independent system installed)

That being a perversion and only useful for people who need excessive disk writing speeds and have processor that exceeds disk speed in accomplishing specific tasks. For use for eg. film processing in raw formats ect.

-lass expensive but still fast and secure option:
1# drive: Raid0 field, 2x160 GB (or more depending of software you'll install and work needs), 2 partitions
1st partition, 60gb (or more)
OS and all the software is installed on this partition
2nd partition: rest of the Raid disk space
only for files you are working on right now
2#drive: non raid drive, as big as need be for storage of files

backup: 3#drive: non raid drive, backup for all those drives (about the same size as all the drives together, separate OS eg. XP64 and backup and restore software installed on first 10-20GB partition, files on the other partition) or external backup device

-lass expensive but still fast option:
same as above, no no backup drive

-lass expensive bit slower option (i'd not install vistax64 on laser workstation configuration):
same as above, no 2# drive and no backup drive

-for laptops (or workstation without raid): If you install vista on a laptop without raid disk do the same as last option, but keep in mind that no version of vista is meant for non raid disk at all and that it ll slow your computer down.

It is still possible to obtain a great deal of speed and preserve disk space by tweaking vista system. Read next post.

[ibach]

To reduce disk space used by Vista installation:

use vLite to clean unneeded features from Vista installation.

With removing speech recognition, unneeded language support, unneeded drivers ect. you can save about half the space for Vista without losing important features.
you can also preconfigure vista installation, slipstram updates and many things more. Read online tutorials and discussions on neowin.net and msfn

To speed up Vista:

Reducing disk space used by Vista with above method will also speed it up a bit, but there are a lot more things to do with or without reducing size.

Enable logon as "REAL ADMINISTRATOR" and delete all other user accounts you can delete will speed it up and reduce size. Security will be lower, but if you have good AV software as AVG and SpyBot installed, who cares.

Disable UAC (User Account Controll)

Disable ShadowCoping on all drives.

Disable LAST ACCESSED timestamp for all files

Those are the tweaks i use as mandatory for all configurations even the best one.
(to regain security on better configurations i use additional external software in rare cases)

Using the tweaks above you'll gain in response time about 100% by skipping idiotic vista dialog boxes and such (UAC). (What would happen if Microsoft was making cars? When you kick brakes, the car would ask you: Are you sure?"...)
You'll gain in disk read and write speed simply by reducing redundant data on the disk and redundant data writing (shadowcopy and last accessed timestamp) and removing eg. retarded and inefficient, memory resident system virus protection as windows defender (use eg. AVG and SpyBot instead).

Anyway, what i've written here is not very useful to anyone, but with the above as a hint and a lot of googling around you'll finally end up with the system performance at maximum and only boundary will be set by your hardware.

[kameshdatta]

how much files in vista windows how much size of vista C:\windows