My "Windows bloat" has become too large and it's time to do an OS reinstall. (I'm going to be boring and reinstall Win XP 32bit; yes the x64 version would give a little boost with VirtualDub, AviSynth & Xvid but I'm worried about hardware compatibility. And I'd rather wait a while before I go Vista).

I've bought a new drive so I can reinstall without losing any data. In the past I haven't organised things very well; I currently have 2 drives with a single partition on each, the OS, pagefile, documents and settings, program files, etc. are all on C:.

I now have 3 physical drives:
1. 250GB SATA II (16MB Cache) - Full (Fastest?)
2. 160GB SATA II (2MB Cache) - Empty
3. 80GB ATA100 (8MB Cache) - Full (Slowest?)

This time I'm going to try and keep things organised. I've read up a bit about pagefile settings and found conflicting advice, so I'd appreciate thoughts from you PC geeks.

My plan is:
- Create a 2GB FAT32 partition at the front of drive 2 for the Windows pagefile. The remaining space is to be an NTFS partition, and the 80GB of archived storage currently on drive 3 is to be copied over.
- Reformat Drive 3, leave it as one big 80GB NTFS primary partition and install the OS here (some sites say you should have a pagefile on this partition as well). Installed software is to go on this drive, along with temporary storage of downloads.
- Use Drive 1 for the Documents and Settings folder (i.e. user profiles, documents, working files, email folders, desktop, favourites, temporary internet files etc.), basically the stuff that gets used the most. This drive holds the current OS install; if I delete the Windows and Program Files folders to free up a bit of space I should be able leave the current Documents and Settings folder alone and just carry out a defragment.

Any thoughts guys?

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quote:

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Originally posted by Mother

Any thoughts guys?

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I have 1GB of RAM. Not a big gamer.

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Originally posted by eljefeoscuro
Don't EVER put your paging file in a fat32 partition, it can slow you down more than help, especially considering the file limitations in fat32.

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How can it slow you down? FAT32 is supposed to be faster than NTFS for small volumes.

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Originally posted by eljefeoscuro
Don't EVER waste THAT much time splitting up your windows install, it just gets complicated and shitty all over your drives.

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Even Microsoft recommend having a second pagefile in its own partition on a different physical drive.

As for storing the Documents and Settings folder on drive 1, yes it does take a bit of dicking around with the registry. It just seemed simpler than splitting out the "My Documents" folder for each user. I was thinking it might improve performance if my wife's 2GB Outlook PST file is on a different drive to the OS.

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The second pagefile information is very dated. It is no longer needed or helpful. XP made the first major move towards streamlining and SP2 patched it up some more.

As for your wife's pst file, just move it to the other drive ( you can specify where to put it in outlook)

For FAT32, yes it has faster seek times for smaller files, but hardly worth it when hard drives have the cache, buffers, and seek times that they have today. It just leads to tail chasing and too much swap time, hence slowing things down. Drive space is cheap and fast today, its not worth complicating what XP can do. If you were running 2k, I would say definitely, second page file, FAT32 part.

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