IT help please

Re: Wrong

My samsung laptop ?windows 7 has 200GB recovery partition , a 100MB NTFS system partition and C 231 GB NTFS boot crash dump primary partition. D drive is a 345GB NTFS logical drive. The reason I suggest using Partition Magic or something like that is it is easier to use and understand. If you are unsure what to do thw Windows disk management on Windows 7 is confusing. e.g. messing with primary partition allocation etc. can mean your PC wont boot properly. Parttion magic is far easier to understand (well I think so anyway)

 

"Alternatively back everything up. Format the drive and reinstall it all onto one big partition."

HMMMM!! Whilst the size limits of virtual disks partitions is historical as there were physical limits as to how big a formatted disk could be, and whilst NTFS does reduce fragmentation compared to FAT32 putting everything onto a single partition is inadvisable as it slows down read write activity and also have you tried defragging a large Disk. It takes forever!!! (notwithsatnding you dont have to do it that often. However the same can be said of virus scan activity. DO you really want to scan every single file on your PC every timeat startup or conecntrate on partitions/ virtual drives that you access and leave the backup/ recovery parttions alone. For those reasons I think parttioning disks is better for PCs. Servers are a different thing entirely particularly when RAID arrays are involved

 

Thanks everyone - much appreciated. Would love a mac but a bit out of my price range at the moment

 

Disagree. Wiki (agree it is a bit dubious source states)> " (PARTITIONING) ..Raising overall computer performance on systems where smaller file systems are more efficient. For instance, large hard drives with only one NTFS file system typically have a very large sequentially accessed Master File Table (MFT) and it generally takes more time to read this MFT than the smaller MFTs of smaller partitions.
"Short Stroking", which aims to minimize performance-eating head repositioning delays by reducing the number of tracks used per hard drive.[1] The basic idea is that you make one partition approx. 20-25% of the total size of the drive. This partition is expected to: occupy the outer tracks of the hard drive, and offer more than double the throughput — less than half the access time. If you limit capacity with short stroking, the minimum throughput stays much closer to the maximum. This technique, however, is not related to creating multiple partitions, but generally just creating a partition less than the disk size. For example, a 1 TB disk may have an access time of 12 ms at 200 IOPS (at a limited queue depth) with an average throughput of 100 MB/s. When it is partitioned to 100 GB (and the rest left unallocated) access time may be decreased to 6 ms at 300 IOPS (with a bigger queue depth) with an average throughput of 200 MB/s.



Partitioning for significantly less than the full size available when disk space is not needed can reduce the time for diagnostic tools such as checkdisk to run or for full image backups to run."
Regularly accessed files spread across multipe partitions may be an issue but I was alwayss taught that overall smaller partitions are far more efficient. It also states its better to place swap file space on single partition (although I thought swap file process pnly benefits exist where swapfile is on separate Physical disk.) This is less relevant nowadays with the cheap RAM that is available.

 

Nowt to do with Windows, this is how the laptop would have been set up - the idea is Windows and your programmes go on the C drive, you put all your video, music, documents or whatever on the D drive. Then if you need to wipe the hard drive and start a fresh with a new operating system etc, all your files are still there.

 

That is just not true, my ex-wife cost a feckin fortune !!

 

Wouldn't bother mate, I made a half-hearted attempt at switching around the time Windows Vista came out...everything's a bit shinier but as a tool for doing something productive I found Mac OS to be pretty useless. I have an Air which lives under the sofa which I forget about for weeks, other than that I pull it out for a quick browse on the net which it does rather well.

What got me are all those little freeware tools that come in handy now and again with Windows that either aren't available on Mac or you have to pay for. I'll also admit I use some cracked software and while you can get this for Mac, I've had a hard time getting it to work.