Sizes of C and D drives on new PC

thefirs

Just installing Windows 7 from a preinstalled file on my daughter's Xmas present and the Samsung laptop setup routine asks me to allocate the sizes of the C and D drives. The default is 50:50, but is this the optimal proportion to select?

It's a 250Gb disk and it has pre-allocated 15Gb Restore, 100Mb System, with the rest to be user-allocated between the C and D drives. It refers to data backup and images copied from the C to the D drive for easy restore, but there's no other advice.

I normally take the default in cases such as these, but is there anything to be gained by fiddling?

TechTerry

I would leave it as it is, I suppose its personal preference. The C drive is normally where all your programs, my documents, my photos, etc will be stored. The D Drive is normally a data drive which is like a huge my documents folder. I personally store everything in the My Documents folder so in my case I would make the C Drive bigger and use the D drive to create backups of my important folders. But its totally up to you. Some techs would prefer to store all their data into a D drive and keep the C drive just for programs so that the C drive dont fragment as much but your daughter is probbally used to using a computer the way most people are taught at school which is to save in their my documents folder. Their is very little benifit to the average user in my eyes.

Good luck!

BillScarab

I wouldn't bother partitioning it at all. But really it's up to you how you do it, decide how you want ot use the machine and partition it accordingly.

[Deleted User]

TechTerry wrote: »

I would leave it as it is, I suppose its personal preference. The C drive is normally where all your programs, my documents, my photos, etc will be stored. The D Drive is normally a data drive which is like a huge my documents folder. I personally store everything in the My Documents folder so in my case I would make the C Drive bigger and use the D drive to create backups of my important folders. But its totally up to you. Some techs would prefer to store all their data into a D drive and keep the C drive just for programs so that the C drive dont fragment as much but your daughter is probbally used to using a computer the way most people are taught at school which is to save in their my documents folder. Their is very little benifit to the average user in my eyes.

Good luck!

Of course you can easily redirect your My Documents folder then you'd be none the wiser on a day to day basis.

I prefer having my My Documents on a separate partion for two reasons:

1. Less fragmentation on the system drive
2. Whenever I need to restore it back to factory defaults the CD only overwrites the C drive, not the D drive.

John_Gray

As suggested above, the aim would be to have all Microsoft's Stuff on the C: drive ("200 GB should be enough for anyone"!) and all Your Stuff on the drive (the rest). Then you should only rarely need to back up the C: drive, because it shouldn't change much. Whereas you should back up the drive frequently, weekly (say) full backups, and incrementals during the week,m as often as you feel the need. (Other fine backup schemes are available!)