Installing Windows XP *Beware Stupid Question

Okay when installing a fresh Windows XP...

It asks you to create a Partition... I saw two partions... one larger, and one smaller. I deleted both. There was one large unpartioned space after that. I press Format... and Im not sure if I created a partion. Cause it asked to create a partion as well, however I just formated. I dont play with any partions... I just want a clean open drive. No partions... never found the use of them.

Is this okay?

Also... When I left it on Formating (not quick format) to grab a bit to eat, I returned and it was already loading windows... I thought there was something you had to press, or enter...

You are better off having some partitions, that way if you screw up your OS you can reinstall the OS and still have your files on the other partition without any troubles. My two cents..

Yes it will work, however most people prefer to partition a drive to separate the OS files from apps/games

I prefer to make a 10gb OS partition and either one or two other partitions depending on if there are two drives in the machine.

If only one drive in the machine I will make a 10gb OS and then a 2gb Pagefile and rest for games/apps

If there are more than two drives I will make a 10gb OS partition and rest for games then put the pagefile on another drive.

Explain to me the logic behind creating a seperate swap partition on the same physical disk (or even a seperate physical disk attached to the same IDE channel) as the OS/apps....

Seems to be counterproductive to me to go to such lengths to place a hard swapfile limit on your system unless there's some sort of a performance benefit.

A separate partition for swapfile will do nothing but cause you to take a performance hit.

Partitions aid in organization, but degrade drive performance with every one you create.

Take for instance the following rudamentary depictions:

| 1 |

| 1 | 2 |

| 1 | 2 | 3 |

| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |

The first drive is a single partition. All reads and writes are confined to one linear space.

The second drive has two partitions. Any time data must be retrieved/written to alternate partitions, the heads must travel back and forth between the logical division of that drive. The remaining drives containing 3 and 4 partitions follow suit...just with even more reasons for the head to have to travel.

Now, say you have 3 partitions on one drive; an OS, applications, and swap partitions. Now, let's say you are playing a game. The OS partition is going to be busy with driver/kernel services, resource management, etc. The applications partition will be managing reads/writes for the game information (map loading, profile writing, etc.), and the swapfile is going to be busy doing the obvious. Your hard drive is being thrashed between these three partitions. Depending on the size of the drive and space between partitions, the amount of travelling may be quite large and is only wearing out the access arm while the heads are screaming back and forth across the platters.

In short, partitions in number are best kept to archive drives that don't see constant read/write access.

just as I suspected.... I can see having swap on a fast **seperate** disk from the OS and Apps (such as a second partition on a data-only drive) but yeah, creating a 3-partition scheme on one physical disk just doesn't seem like a good idea unless you need to do so for some logistical reason (like multiple OS'es or a seperate data-only partition).

SickBoy said:

Explain to me the logic behind creating a seperate swap partition on the same physical disk (or even a seperate physical disk attached to the same IDE channel) as the OS/apps....

Seems to be counterproductive to me to go to such lengths to place a hard swapfile limit on your system unless there's some sort of a performance benefit.

Click to expand...

On the same disk there isn't a lot of benefit to be had. The only real advantage there would be the ability to format the swap partition using FAT32 instead of NTFS.
http://www.ntfs.com/ntfs_vs_fat.htm

Using a second drive on the same channel would show additional performance increases. Not because of increased bandwidth, but in reduced latency since the RW head of the second drive should stay in the general area of the swap file assuming the second drive wasn't in use.

That's the general logic behind it. For most users there's little benefit to be had from changing the swap file. In general you should just adjust for the type of system you're setting up. For instance if I'm setting up an average system (single HD) with limited HD space I leave the swap file alone.

If I'm setting up the same type of system with an additional HD but still smaller volumes (<40GB total) I set the swap to system managed but to use both drives since Windows is supposed to choose the drive with the lowest usage to use for the swap file.

If I'm setting up a single drive system with plenty of HD space then I will create a 3gb FAT32 partition and set the page file there as system managed.

In my own system I have 3 HD each with a 2GB FAT32 partition with a fixed page file size of 1.5GB. That seems to work out pretty good for me.

Anyway, the point I'm getting at is that there can be some benefits to be had from changing around the partitions for the swap file, but there is no hard fast rule that will work in every case. For most systems (especially if they've already had Windows installed) it's best to just leave them on system managed and forget about it. One final note, it's almost impossible to place a hard limit on the page file. Even if you do limit the page file, as long as there is additional space on the boot volume, Windows will create/expand the page file to fit its needs even if exceeds the amount set.