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%...
> 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.
>
> )



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.

Spikey wrote:
> 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.
>
> )

Yes.

On Sun, 3 Aug 2008 03:19:26 +0100, "Spikey" <.> wrote:

>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.

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:
>
> 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.
>
> )

what?

"Ringmaster" <> wrote in message
news:...
> On Sun, 3 Aug 2008 03:19:26 +0100, "Spikey" <.> wrote:
>
>>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.
>
> 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.
>

I 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:

>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.
>
>)
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" <> wrote in message news:...
>>
>> Opinions greafully received.
>>
>> )
>
> what?

That 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:

> 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:
> 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.
>
> )

Why partition a HDD unless you're going to dual boot, and a 110GB isn't
large enough to even do that.
The idea of putting the OS on one partition and documents on another
partition on the same HDD makes no real sense whatsoever because if the
OS crashes and is unrecoverable and requires a clean install, you'll
have to reinstall all of your apps anyway.
Plus by putting your apps or docs on anything other than C drive you go
against the default settings of Vista.
Here's is the best way to get maximum efficiency our of Vista by using
it's default placement for docs and ensuring a backed up, synchronized
copy of your documents fold.
Get an external drive, preferable an eSATA and load Vista normally on C
drive along with all of your apps and documents in their default
folders. When finished, right click on your documents folder in C drive
and move it to the external drive. When finished, you will have a new
folder on C drive named My Documents. Then go into your control panel to
Offline Files and click on "enable offline files". Right click on your
"My Documents" folder and put a check mark beside "Always available
Offline".
This way, when you work on anything that is contained in your My
Documents folder, (docs, pics, videos, etc)or when you create any new
folders or sub-folders, it will automatically update the synced copy
that is on C drive...it is in fact, an automatic instant backup so to
speak of your My Documents folder.
Also by using an external eSAT HDD there is no file conversation as with
a USB drive, so it's faster and since eSATA drives require an external
power supply (they all come with one), you won't worry if your main
power supply fries up your computer.
Plus of course, in case of a fire or earthquake or whatever, you can
simply grab it and run and you will have everything contained in your MY
Documents folder.