A very helpful and interesting reply. I've ordered the machine now, and
it will come as one big 80gig C:, NTFS.
Most do. That's how MS has been telling us OEMs to do it since XP
came out, the idea being that our clients may have the ability to earn
and pay for a computer, but would be confused by "too many letters".
Are you suggesting I should partition it into smaller partitions to
increase performance? Would it make much difference?
It's what I'd do, but it's also a YMMV thing. As to difference; what
I find is that the speed stays the same from when the HD is new and
almost empty, to when it's acquired 70G of bumph. It gets rid of the
"I should delete things I don't need to speed up the system", or
rather, makes that apply only to what is running resident.
The other difference is data survival and recoverability, which to my
mind is the biggie. Other useful effects are easier maintenance
(thinks like ChkDsk, Defrag) as what is "always in use" is small
enough to wait for, and as the bulk of the HD is not always in use, it
can be managed in the background.
Then there's the quality of maintenance and recovery tools, which suck
for NTFS. As long as your FATxx volumes don't cross the 137G line,
you can access data from DOS mode and use interactive Scandisk rather
than the "trust me" ChkDsk, plus DiskEdit etc. for manual repair.
Malware management is less of a big deal these days, if you have
access to and use Bart PE's boot CDR builder and tools that you plug
into that, instead of relying on DOS mode diskette boot as your
maintenance OS for formal malware cleanup.
The thing is, while the machine is "fresh" is the time to do this, as
the process is destructive (or at least potentially so).
Check that you get a real (as oppsed to "genuine") Windows CD, though,
because otherwise you lose control over the installation process.
A "real" (fully-capable) OS installation disk can:
- be booted and run as Recovery Console
- be booted and from there, do a "repair" install
- be booted and from there, do a full install
- be accessed via Windows, to add/remove Windows components
- be accessed via Windows, to install Recovery Console to hard drive
- be accessed via Windows, and \i386 be copied to hard drive
- be accessed from DOS, for custom install via "answer file"
A "genuine" Windows CD just means MS got paid.
So the second solves MS's problems but does nothing to solve yours,
other than preventing MS making their problems your problems by
busting you for piracy. The idea is that market forces should crunch
vendors who fail to supply "real" CDs, but those market forces depend
on pre-sale visibility - and the nature of what OEMs ship with PCs is
arranged behind closed doors with MS and hidden from the pubic.
Phone the sales droids of a big OEM vendor knows to provide only a
"recovery" disk that wipes the HD and re-creates their factory
install, and ask them, in detail, what their OS CD can do. I'm 90%
certain you'll be fobbed off with "
And is NTFS like FAT32 - if you repartition, you have to scrub the disk
and reinstall everything?
With BING from
www.bootitng.com you can:
- rapidly create and format FAT16, FAT32 (> 32G) and NTFS
- ensure NTFS coversion won't leave you with 512-byte clusters
- delete, copy and image (back up) these partitions and volumes
- resize and slide these partitions and volumes
On interoperability between FATxx and NTFS; you can convert from FATxx
to NTFS, but there's no way back that doesn't destroy the contents of
the NTFS volume. I find that another strong reason to avoid NTFS.
If you do go for it, check youhave everything you need first - and if
older than SP2, turnon firewall straight after the build, before going
online (SP2 will do that for you)
------------------------ ---- --- -- - - - -
Forget
http://cquirke.blogspot.com and check out a
better one at
http://topicdrift.blogspot.com instead!
