Advice on getting the best out of a XP hard drive

[Sprog]

Are there any good general rules when installing XP regarding the size of a hard drive?

My hard drive is 200GB. I'm wondering if it's advantageous to install XP in its own partition, say 20GB?

Then, install software like games and keep My Documents folder on another, so if I ever had to reinstall XP then I could at least get access to my own files.

How many partitions should I have with a 200GB and why?
Should move the Paging File too?

Thanks for your attention and any advice you can give.

 

[site3op]

I would say that you would do well to have a 20GB OS partition, and I would keep the paging on that. Your other partitions are strictly up to you; just keep in mind defragging speed in your decisions. If you want quicker defrags, obviously have smaller partitions. I personally have partions in the 10GB up to 80GB range depending on what I keep on each.

As long as it's on the same drive, you shouldn't worry about where you put your paging file; heck, just make a 4 or 5 GB partition just for that.

 

[fattony]

pagefile access would be fater if it's located on a drive or partition other than your system partition (C, it's recommended to have it on a whole seperate drive actually, but if you don't have that setup, put it on your second partition

 

[Sprog]

Thanks very much, I'll remember that.