Some Reformatting Questions

I finally broke down and bought an external HDD (320G). What I eventually want to do is a clean install of XP.

Presently, I have my 70G internal HDD divided into two partitions, C and D. D is my storage area, music, pics, documents and so on. What I am planning to do is to move my stuff in D to the new external HDD, after I delete all the junk in there first. Once that is done, I want to delete D and do a clean install of XP, essentially making the all of the 70G a C drive.

I have a couple of questions about that though, would it be better to make a partition for page file? If so, how big? However, before I install XP, I would like to write zeros to my internal HDD. Is there a free generic zero drive utility program to do that?

The best is to create a 8GB partition for the swapdrive, and let windows manage it's own swapfile size. 8GB might be a bit large, but capping it at 4GB is sometimes too small... And since you have another larger external harddisk, you won't really miss the 4 extra GB's.

So I would say, make your:
- C partition 62GB for windows and appz
- D partition 8GB for pure swapfile
- E partition 320GB your external harddisk

A separate swapfile partition is faster, but don't expect miracles from it, although it speeds up programs like photoshop a bit.

Hey, thanks for the quick response.

- D partition 8GB for pure swapfile

Do you mean page file? Just want to make sure we are on the same page.

Hey, thanks for the quick response.



Do you mean page file? Just want to make sure we are on the same page.

Oh haha, swapfile = pagefile, it's just another name for the same thing.

it wont matter in terms of performance, since both partitions are on the same physical disk.

it wont matter in terms of performance, since both partitions are on the same physical disk.

Actually it does, since the swapfile will be the only file on that partition, you cancel out the fragmentation of different files across the same partition. You wont notice it at first, but when you've used your new instalation like a month or 2~3, your harddisk becomes quite a jigsaw puzzle. And you don't want to have your virtual memory (=swapfile) spread out across 1 large partition with many, many other files inbetween it. That can really slow down your pc with programs that consume a LOT of memory.

But yeah, having the swapfile on a -physical- other drive will always be faster, since you can acces both physical drives at the same time, but that's not the case right now. So having a separate swap partition is the best performance result you can get without spending any extra money.

Having two partitions on one single hard drive and page file on the second partition is stupid, doesn't increase performance at all. The head of the harddrive will be forced to move back and forth between the main partition and the page file partition instead of a general section.

Defrag should be among the first things you do when trying to increase performance. Having the page file on a separate partition on the same physical drive will only slow you down.

I have a few more questions. What is the best free anti-virus and firewall, and are not resource hogs?

for the 70G HDD I'd do
4G partition for pagefile using FAT32
30G partition for OS (windows)
rest for off-time backup, ie stuff you would NEVER likely to touch again.

for the 320 HDD, I'd do
4G partition for pagefile using FAT32
80G partition for Apps/Games
rest for backups/others.

pagefiles doesnt need the transaction capabilities in NTFS, thus FAT32 is better.
It is better (IMO) to split your apps and OS to make use of multiple disks concurrently. The 4G pagefile on each disk is just a suggested number. I usually do 1.5xRAM + 32 Mbytes (IIRC). The exact formula can be found somewhere.

You can also relocate the caches for certain apps etc, but that's a bit too hand-on. 30G for the OS drive is big enough since most apps go to the 2nd drive. Some apps however doesnt let you change their installation path. MS for example requires around 3G of space on your primary drive for caching while it tries to install. Finally the offline backup is stuff you're likely to look at every blue moon.

jesus u guys rly r smartys lmao. W/E GummyBear just said idk..good thing im just a pro gamer for an occupation which doesnt require much with computers