Some Moral Support Please.... - by suewan
Lightfall on 25/11/2006 at 18:01
Shug, I've always run games and non-essential programs (mirc, photoshop, ect...) on a secondary partition and I've never had a problem.
Nameless, I suppose 20 gigs is extreme, but I found 10 to be cramped. I used to have Win2000 which fit in 10 gigs without issue, but then I upgraded to XP, which was significantly fatter than 2k. After installing essential programs (browsers, plugins, anything that came with my hardware other than demos and crap) I found I only had about 2 gigs left to work with for the swap file, and it seemed to chew through that pretty fast. I went with 20 gigs this time not only to give my swap file all the room it wanted knowing it's not likely to ever hit that wall, but also hopefully to avoid this repartitioning issue if I upgrade my OS again as I'm sure the next version will be even fatter than XP.
Turtle on 25/11/2006 at 18:20
Checking in to lend some oral support.
Nameless Voice on 25/11/2006 at 21:01
Quote Posted by Lightfall
SI found I only had about 2 gigs left to work with for the swap file, and it seemed to chew through that pretty fast.
True enough, Windows XP seems to have got really bloated since SP2. But that's why I said to make a separate partion for the swapfile alone. That way, it won't get fragmented as it grows larger.
ZylonBane on 25/11/2006 at 23:21
IMHO, every PC user should own a copy of Partition Magic. It's perfect for shuffling around partitions without having to get your hands overly dirty.
Lightfall on 26/11/2006 at 21:58
It's a good idea, NV, not shooting it down. I just thought it was easier to leave it in the main partition for the moment since I'd given it rediculous amounts of room. If the next OS takes too big of a byte (har har) out of 20 gigs, that's probably what I'll have to do. As for Partition Magic, I've heard lots of horror stories about it, but perhaps it's become more stable over the years. Has it ever given you any hiccups, ZB?
Shug on 27/11/2006 at 01:51
Quote Posted by Lightfall
Shug, I've always run games and non-essential programs (mirc, photoshop, ect...) on a secondary partition and I've never had a problem.
I'm sure you haven't had any issues - it was a question of which method performed better rather than either being problematic
ZylonBane on 27/11/2006 at 02:03
Quote Posted by Lightfall
As for Partition Magic, I've heard lots of horror stories about it, but perhaps it's become more stable over the years. Has it ever given you any hiccups, ZB?
I've only used version 8, and had no problems using it to shuffle around partition sizes on a dual-boot NTFS/FAT32 drive.
As always though, it helps to know what you're doing.
suewan on 2/12/2006 at 00:05
Well, folks, my computer did die a painful death but it wasn't something that solved by reformatting, in fact it died before I had chance and thankfully, I managed to back up the essential crap. But the good news I now have a brand new spanking pc so the story has a happy ending but now I have to go through the progress of reinstalling my thief games, darkloader, garrettloader, etc...but its a small price 2 pay. I don't miss my old pc at all. The stupid machine had so many issues it just wasn't funny...if it wasn't the hardware acting up, it was the software, etc. It was just a screwy system.
Nameless Voice on 2/12/2006 at 11:00
Quote Posted by Lightfall
As for Partition Magic, I've heard lots of horror stories about it, but perhaps it's become more stable over the years. Has it ever given you any hiccups, ZB?
I've seen PartitionMagic mark partitions as 'BAD' a few times, after which the partition is basically inaccessible, and you need to use the partition table editing tool to manually change the byte that stores the file system that the hard disk uses back to its appropriate value (e.g. the code for NTFS).
Great fun.
Mortal Monkey on 3/12/2006 at 12:44
I've never had any trouble with Partition Magic, but then again, I've never used it from within an operating system. I can't say that not using partition magic is a good idea either, since MSDOS (and therby fdisk) likes to use different drive letters than Windows (which I learnt the hard way).
I guess the moral of the story is that, whichever way you choose to mangle your HDD, always make backups first.
