Re: Do I need to partition?

Tech-Archive recommends: Fix windows errors by optimizing your registry

From: Donald McDaniel (orthocrossAT_at_cablespeed.DOTcom)
Date: 02/16/04 

Date: Sun, 15 Feb 2004 18:47:56 -0800

neptoone wrote:
> Thanks guys for taking the time to address my issue. Donald, I think
> you made your point, even though I'm not technical as you guys are.
> But I think you are right that the partition methodology came from
> the early years. In my case, after reading your comments, I think
> that partion is not a requirement for my needs.
>
> I am not planning to boot up with dual OS to begin with. As I
> mentioned the slave HD with 160GB which I already partitioned is my
> slave drive. My master has 80 GB and would not have any data. I had a
> great experience recently with my other PC, I had to re-installed
> Wind998 and never touched my data, thanks goodness !
>
> Donald, but have a question for you. Since I usually place most of my
> programs on my master HD, if I am trying to run the program I would
> rather have the data go into the slave drive, but most of the time
> the program would not let me do that. Do you think that I should only
> have Windows on that drive and any other programs and drives on the
> secondary drive, or just leave them all as one happy family?

Usually, programs will allow you to set the volume where your data is saved.
In the case of the great majority of Windows programs, this is usually
hardwired as "C:\Documents and Settings", but can be almost always be
changed for individual files. It is possible to change these hardwired
folders in the Registry. However, I say out of the Registry as much as
possible.

Some like to separate their System volume from their programs and data.
While this seems reasonable, because of the possibility of system crashes
requiring reinstallation of the OS, it takes a lot of work, since most
Windows programs are hardwired to use C:\Program Files and C:\Documents and
Settings for programs, settings, and data. I am fairly lazy. By the way,
each time I do a defrag of my page file, it seldom has more than 1 or 2
fragments, so the excuse of moving the page file to a different paritition
than the System partition to avoid excess fragmentation doesn't wash with me

Personally, I install all programs in C:\Program Files, save all data in
C:\Documents and Settings\, keep all my media files in C:\Documents and
Settings\Music, or C:\Documents and Settings\pictures, and keep all my
downloaded program files on my secondary drive, along with backups of all
other necessary data, such as Outlook data files, Internet Explorer
favorites, my music files, and family pictures, and any other file I want
backed up. You might want to do it differently. Each person has his own
ideas about these things. Usually, people buy large HD's for storage of
media files, disk images, etc. Another use for a huge secondary HD is as a
base for virtual CDs (using a third party program).

This makes it easy to restore my system in the event that Windows gets
corrupted or crashes so bad I have to reinstall the system. I always
install Windows "clean" (and do so every few months or so), so a backup of
of my data files is necessary.

By the way, an 80gig HD with only system files on it is a TERRIBLE waste of
disk space, since the most XP and its data files is going to need is 5gig
max.

So, in a nutshell, I use C: for the system files, programs, and their data
and settings, and D: (secondary drive) for backups of those files, and
always do clean installs of XP. This requires that I reinstall my program
files each time, but I really don't mind. 

-- 
Donald L McDaniel
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