Any point of installing Win XP on seperate drive?

[bradmax57]

Im sure ive read before elsewhere that installing windows on a seperate drive to games etc seems to work okay, is there any benefit to this? Reason I ask is Im thinking of getting a WD raptor SATA drive but as its only 37gb or 74gb would be a considerable downsize to what ive already got. At the moement my windows seems to take a while to load as I install more and more games and apps, nothing seems to work at all until my scanner initialises then everythings fine, i know the scanner works okay as on a fresh copy of win with only the basics installed its like lightning, maybe my hdd is kapputt

[Aedan]

Seperating OS, applications and swap does help.

Basically, when you come to start up an application, the system spends time loading in both OS DLLs and application DLLs. If they're on different drives this can help when you start up an app. If you swap at all, then putting the swap file on a different disk to the OS/applications can help much more.

[Kaitain]

For general slowdown, it sounds just like your average dose of windows registry bloat. Windows always slows down as its apps database gets bigger. Could be worse - could be using an RPM database

WRT your scanner, what else loads into the system tray at startup? Windows loads startup services (wireless networking drivers, scanner/printer utils etc) in any ol' haphazard order. If you've got a lot of programs dumping quickstarts into the system tray (think Winamp, Winzip, RealOne, OpenOffice, Mozilla QuickLauncher) and you've got several minutes at the start where Windows looks like it should be ready to use, but in fact isn't.

The only info I've seen wrt putting games on a different drive is in fact to have 2 completely separate OS installs - one with all the productivity software, scanner drivers etc, and one with only games. That way, games run unimpaired by non-essential background tasks. And you're not tempted to stop working for a "quick" spot of fragging

[bradmax57]

Originally Posted by Áedán

Seperating OS, applications and swap does help.

Basically, when you come to start up an application, the system spends time loading in both OS DLLs and application DLLs. If they're on different drives this can help when you start up an app. If you swap at all, then putting the swap file on a different disk to the OS/applications can help much more.

forgive my ignorance but never did understand much about swap files?

[shadowdr]

I like to keep my OS by itself on it's own partition.I have a seperate partition for apps and games.I have them both installed as 10 gig partitions so that they have plenty of room but not so much that the data is scattered.It has advantages like easy backup and less fragmentation of your os and program partition.
Actually i have three total drives two maxtor 80 gigs in raid 0 and another maxtor 40 for partition backups and a swapfile partition for photo programs.

[Aedan]

Originally Posted by bradmax57

forgive my ignorance but never did understand much about swap files?

That's ok. Basically most modern OSes have a method of allowing applications to use more memory than is actually in the machine. The swap file is a big part of this mechanism, as it's used to store the bits that won't actually fit in memory.

This works out quite well on the whole, as programs usually have parts that rarely get used. Rather than keep everything in memory, even if it's not being used, parts that aren't being used end up in the swap file. This frees up memory for other stuff!

[Aedan]

On Kaitain's comment - there's a great bit of program from Mike Lin called "Startup Monitor". This program basically sits in the background, and tells you when a program adds itself to your startup. It also gives you the option to stop the program adding itself.

Startup Monitor can be found at http://www.mlin.net/StartupMonitor.shtml

[bradmax57]

Originally Posted by Áedán

On Kaitain's comment - there's a great bit of program from Mike Lin called "Startup Monitor". This program basically sits in the background, and tells you when a program adds itself to your startup. It also gives you the option to stop the program adding itself.

Startup Monitor can be found at http://www.mlin.net/StartupMonitor.shtml

Thankyou I will give that a go

[Aedan]

Unfortunately, it's only useful to tell you when something tries to add itself. It's not much use for removing things that are already there. MSConfig's better for that.