Im about to build myself a new PC in the next few weeks and wondered if anyone has any advise about partitioning a 500GB HDD with Win 764bit

On my current XP system I have the system and programs in one partition and all my data in 2 other ones so that I can reformat and reinstall to the system partition without losing my data.

If I were to do this, how much system partition would I need for win7 64 bit , MS Office Pro and photoshop ?

What about pagefiles - where does Win7 put them ? On my XP system Ive put pagefile in a small partition all of its own.

There's no point giving a page file it's own partition on the same disk - just set it to a fixed size on C:

As for how big to make the partition - I've got a 30gb C: on my laptop where disk space is tight and on my desktop I use a 100gb.

Dependent on the amount of ram you're planning on throwing in this system you may want to disable the pagefile entirely. Why bother using a slow HDD to store stuff if you've got a shed load of fast memory to utilise? Strangely enough swapping items in and out of RAM from a HDD is often quicker than using a pagefile.

As for partition size. A minimum of 30GB. Something around 40Gb is a better option in reality. IIRC Win 7 uses around 9GB on it's own and roughly 8GB of pagefile/hibernation files .... and they say Win 7 is supposed to be netbook friendly?

As a side note a lot of people partition drives so they can re-install their system without losing data. It's a good idea but in reality you're still using one hard drive to hold all your stuff. Often it's a good idea to have two smaller drives. The drive containing your OS will be working harder for the most part and hence is more likely to fail. Plus you get to utilise two separate data channels so accessing and copying stuff to and fro is quicker.

If you want a lightning fast system go for a SSD (solid state drive) to host your OS on. They have slow write times but incredibly fast read times. They can be bought for around £70 nowadays.

Edited 10 January, 201016 yr by allclownsareevi