Vista - Is 30Gb going to be big enough for vista system files and programs?

Hi

I recently did a clean install of home premium, during which I divided up
the 110 Gb drive. I now have 10Gb on the recovery partition; 30 Gb on C: the
system drive and the remainder on D:. for documents etc.

With everything pretty much installed I have used 20 Gb on C: leaving 10Gb
free.

I've read a couple of posts with Vista gobbling up 28 Gb after a short
period of time. So do you think the 30 Gb will be enough long term?? To be
honest thought it would be plenty but am now wishing I'd upped the size of
it a bit more.

Opinions greafully received.

)

"Spikey" <.> wrote in message
news:OODGN%23Q9IHA.4384@xxxxxx

NO

I am fairly new to Vista, having gotten it on a new Dell PC (about a month
old now) with a 500GB hard drive, and, as it stands now, between system
files and current installed programs (pretty much a clean system - no BIG or
excessive programs at all - just acrobat reader, Firefox, Safari, Itunes,
Open Office 2.4, MS Office 97- I know 97 is old, but my wife won't give it
up, though I am trying to move her into OO), it has used roughly 90 gigs,
and I've left all my DATA file (for the most part) on my XP system. I think
the system restore is probably eating a lot of the space, but I haven't
gotten around to looking into it yet.

On Sun, 3 Aug 2008 03:19:26 +0100, "Spikey" <.> wrote:
Short answer, probably not. If all you have left now is 10 GB that's
next to nothing and the paging file assuming it also is on the same
drive as well as the drive itself is already starved for wiggle room.

As a general rule of thumb a hard drive partition should keep roughly
at least 20% of it's total space free. Windows isn't smart enough to
fragment files it writes to the paging file space. So... it can get
into a situation where there is very little contiguous space for a
variety of reasons meaning regardless what size is set aside for the
paging file (often called Swap file in XP) the contiguous space is so
small it forces a lot of disk trashing as Vista is forced to move
stuff from memory to paging file.

One thing I've done for years is use a LARGE drive for my root drive
then partition it into two drives. For me I use a 750 GB drive with C
originally getting 60 GB and E the rest. As C gets cluttered up I
simply shrink the E partition giving C more and more room as time goes
by.

What a lot of users don't realize is when you defrag a lot of software
that performs this task requires Windows to be running. If Windows is
running, it's paging file can't be defragged unless the software you
are using specifically says it can also do that. So you can also get
stuck with a ever decreasing paging file not because of the size you
or Windows made it originally but forgetting it can only be as large
as the largest contiguous space set aside for it. So when you defrag
you might need to "kill" the paging file, then create a new one which
after the space it occupied is now also defragged, rebuild a new one.

Spikey wrote:what?

"Ringmaster" <bigtop@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:bd7a941pbl094lef2m9j1c7idmvj58c8jm@xxxxxxI was rapidly coming to that conclusion. (

At the moment D: hasnt got anything on it as I havent put the docs back on
yet. I'm afraid I'm stuck with 110Gb overall for the forseeable future
finances being what they are.

So how would you deal with it. Given that I have it all updated now. Would
you start again and do a clean install or just shrink D:? Ive havent used
this feature before. Presumably I shrink D: then extend C: ??

Thanks.

On Sun, 3 Aug 2008 03:19:26 +0100, "Spikey" <.> wrote:
Sounds like what I did when XP jammed last time on me.
At that time I decided to divide up the drives sensibly also.
I wanted to use Acronis. Acronis is fairly stingy. They recommended 20 gigs for
the XP OS. I went with 30 gigs. And glad I did. I'm thinking with Vista that 45
gigs would be where I'd start what with UAC, defender, all the M$ mini office,
and then you have those commercial programs that WON'T run from any drive
EXCEPT C:.

I was drooling over a Maxtor external Terabyte drive in office depot the other
day. $200.00

I already have 500 gigs. IOW: If you're looking at Acronis, and a system
partition of 45 gigs... That's pretty much half of the main drive.

Maybe you should think of expanding drive space, cause a system partitionof 45
gigs, or even 30, will leave a lot of unused space if you guess too high.
my pagefile.sys right now is 2.28 gigs. And I still have to remove stuff to
make room.
I couldn't work with a 100 gig HD. Nice thing about Acronis, was the Acronis
partition could be on any drive EXCEPT C:.

--
more pix @ http://members.toast.net/cbminfo/index.html

"theend" <katja023@xxxxxx> wrote in message news:48952447.A55064DC@xxxxxxThat was gratefully received with the "t" missing and the "e" in the wrong
place.

)

With a 110GB HD, using Vista you do not gain any advantage by partioning your
drives so that the OS is seperated from your documents. 10GB isn't enough.
You'd be better off to leave the OS and documents together on one large
partition.
--
oscar

....Right click is your best friend...


"Spikey" wrote:

"Spikey" <.> wrote in message
news:OODGN%23Q9IHA.4384@xxxxxx
If you experience a catastrophic failure of your single hard drive, it
doesn't matter where the OS or data files are, you'll be SOL. What is your
current backup strategy? I ask because...

I'd definitely recommend extending your OS partition. But that would mean
backing up all your data files and if you don't have a way to backup your
data... well...

Long story short, no, 30GB's is probably not enough space for a Vista OS
partition. It -could- be if you're vigilant to a fault, but I'd think life
would be easier for you with a larger OS partition.

Lang

"Aaron" <a@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:E40AF0C8-8D8F-4340-904E-F9F05A172F24@xxxxxx
Then you must have a lot of data on your C drive. I have office 2007, Open
Office 2.4, Firefox, Nokia PC suite, Adobe Reader, and all the other stuff
that came with my Toshiba and my C drive has only used 21GB. I suggest you
have a LOT of stuff in ITunes....