FYI: Vista space

[Eoin]

Hi All,
I have decided to upgrade my PC and put Vista on it (I have a beta version). Got the AMD x64 chip the 1GB RAM, new motherboard and case. Put it all together last night and connected my two hard drives from my "old" system I was using a 12GB HD for my C drive and a 400GB D drive for data.
I booted up to the Vista install DVD no probs and it came up with a Druid type of disk config. I decided to format the C drive, which it did, but it wouldn't let me install the OS on it. Turns out that Vista needs 14GB free space to install!!! Not wanting to put the OS on my lovely 400GB drive I'm off out to try and get a 20GB drive, should be cheap enough.
Be warned, this is a very resource hungry OS...

[intothebigblue]

The Beta version of Vista is all the versions in one, which is why it's so large. When it's finally released, you'll be buying a single, smaller OS for the home or office etc.

Vista also eats RAM. It took over 1/2 gig on my PC running on it's own...

[GCParris]

Indeed - I've been running Vista for several months now in all the betas and now the released Ultimate x64 version.
Not being funny but why are you limiting yourself with a 20GB system drive. Personally I would partition the 400GB drive into a 50GB system drive and a 350GB data drive. Don't restrict yourself to 20GB for the system drive as Program Files will soon fill that up.

If you really want to use the 20GB drive for something, use it for a 2-4GB fixed size PAGEFILE and also update your TEMP / TMP environment variables to write all the temporary file information on there too. That will ramp the speed quite a bit due to being able to read/write from the main disk independently of read/writing the PAGEFILE.

Myself I am running Vista Ultimate x64 with a system partition of 80GB and a data partition of 260GB. You'll also find that using more than 1GB ram, especially 2GB, will make Vista fly (along with a nice graphics card too of course!)

[Eoin]

Yes on the last incarnation of my PC I had a third 2GB drive for swap/temp files, very handy, as it was also on a seperate controller than the other two HDs.
Good point about the size, might get a 40-80GB drive for the C. Don't want to repartition the 400GB drive though.
If the Beta has all the versions on it, will it allow me to choose which one to install? Or will it choose that for me dependent on the spec of the machine?

[GCParris]

When you put the Beta or MSDN Release version of the bootable DVD in the drive it will ask you which version you want to install.
The x86 and x64 versions are on different DVDs.
If you buy the release version (i.e. not a MSDN version like mine) then you will only get the version you purchased (i.e. an x86 version of Vista Ultimate).

[Eoin]

Well, after 3 days running Vista Beta I have wiped my new 80GB C drive and put XP Pro back on. Vista made my new AMD with 1GB of RAM run like my old P3 800MHz with 256MB RAM....

[intothebigblue]

Anyone else thinking of loading up Vista?

Read this before you do!!

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut00...vista_cost.txt

[Garf]

the documentation for vista states quite clearly you need

15GB free hard drive space and 40GB total minimum drive capacity
0.5GB Ram required for operating system

so there shouldn't have been any nasty surpises as long as you read the manual first