Pistoleer

Hiya, due to my current probs i posted here tonight in another thread, it looks like ill have to reformat and reinstall Windows. :/

If i have to do so, i want to do it well. What do you guys recommend as the ideal partitioning setup please?

I have 74Gb Raptor which ill use as my primary drive.
I have 2 320 gig satas ill use for data.

Ive heard it is good practice to create a partition on a drive other than that your OS is on, and set it at say 4GB, and use this as your Swap File. Thoughts on this?

In addition, if i am installing XP Home atm, with the intention of upgrading to Vista over the next few months, but wanting to dual boot.

Should i make a smallish say 7 gig? (currently mine is 4gigs) partition for Win XP

Also make a partition for Vista (leaving room for updates etc) (ideas on size? i read here some people saying 7-20 gigs)

Then use the rest of the Raptor for installing my most used apps. The rest of apps will go on my other drives, so i get the speed benefit from my raptor on important apps..?

Finally for now, is there a way to confirm that i have SATAII enabled at 300Mb/s ? Or how can i do this? I have read that by default they come at 150 speed ?

Cheers ya fonts of knowledge!

edit - oooh, just read that i can save my wpa.bak AND wpa.dbl files from sys 32 folder to avoid having to REactivate my legit copy of windows again. Is there a limit to the number of times one can actually reactivate your own copy? Would be tricky for those of us who swap out Mobos quite often otherwise.

reedit - hmm, on reading Kittani's Paging File guide in stickies above provided by BFRD, which suggests the best course of action is to actually disable your swap file totally... interesting and i can understand why. I can think of a few games that would use close to 2 gigs, but not too much else. Mind you i do like to multitask and have been known to have 20 windows and or Firefox tabs open at once, yeah i know :/