What kind of partition setup for Vista 64-Bit

[faceless]

Hi folks!

I'm gonna get Vista Ultimate 64Bit tomorrow. Now I'm wonderig which would be the most efficient way to partitionate my HDDs. Like for XP many ppl would recommend creating 3 partitions (System/Apps/pagefile). Will it benefit me if I put Vista's pagefile on its own partition?

It never really made sense to me to create a partition just for applications since after a system crash they need to be reinstalled anyways...

So my current plan is to have one partition for windows and apps, one for games, one for my files, and if you guys tell me that I should do so, one partition for the pagefile.

Would you guys say it's necessary to dual boot XP and Vista because there are still too many unsupported applications for Vista 64bit? If yes, how would the perfect dual boot setup look like? I have two 500GB HDDs for my Windows Operating System(s), Games, and files. In addation to that I have on more 250GB HDD where I'm planning to install Linux on. Now, how should I set up my partitions best?

Thank you very much!

//PS: Is it anyhow possible to install a game once on the game partition and use it on both XP and Vista?

Edited April 3, 2007 by faceless

[Jeronimo]

I have 2 for the clarity, multiple partitions should not be necessary for NTFS. Seperate partition for swapfile is not needed, only use a different partition if that is also a different drive then what the OS is installed on. Size of a partition should not be below around 12GB for NTFS volumes otherwise it might be better to use FAT32.

To use games in both OS, your question would differ per game. Some might work without installing twice, but most would probebly work if installed twice to the same location. This can only become clear from a trial an error basis: some games write registry settings (during installation) and if those are not present the game does not start), other games write settings to file and if those use drive/directory-structures then this might also be a problem (1 OS D:\Game, while the other has E:\Game). If there are or come games with 64-bit specific files, then this will become a completely different story (and installation to 2 seperate locations might be needed).

Edited April 3, 2007 by Jeronimo

[faceless]

Thanks for your reply. Concerning the games, that's pretty much what I thought. Yet I hadn't thought about 64-files...

Do I even need a pagefile having about 4GB RAM, an asus P5B-Plus Mainboard w/ 512MB flash memory, and an 8GB Corsair Voyager Jump Drive for Ready Boost?

Edited April 3, 2007 by faceless

[Jeronimo]

With 4Gb of memory I really can not say it depends on so much things. If you use superfetch then I would say yes as Superfetch will always use a big percentage of your memory. If you have a lot of applications open when playing games, this also might require a swapfile.

Best is to check task manager on how much memory is used (with superfetch enabled this will not give a proper read-out). If you never use the complete 4GB, then I would think of disabling the swapfile as this would improve performance (if this is noticeable, I doubt it). However Vista places certain parts in the swapfile and I would think it would be intelligently placed there. I did some testing under XP in the past, I think in 3Dmark05 and the difference was around 1% in performance. This is well below the tollerance stated by Futuremark which is around 3%. This is a theoretical benchmark, so in practice I would guess a gain of less than 1%, which is not noticeable and not worth the trouble. If the rest of your system is at the same standard, then I asume you have a pretty good and large HD and you can spare the 6-10GB in HD space for a swapfile. I would put it at a fixed size so Windows does not need to resize it (at least a fixed limitted size of say 6GB). It seems quite a lot, but I am just keeping the 1.5x - 2.5x in mind, I have no experience with this much memory so it is really hard to tell how much would be required.

Edited April 3, 2007 by Jeronimo

[spacesurfer]

I like to keep things organized. So I have an XP partition; vista partition; programs partition; documents partition for my financial docs, computing docs, school notes, etc.; media part for music, videos, and photos; and lastly an images partition for ghost images and now imagex images.