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I\'m about to reformat my pc; I was wondering how I should partition for best performance and practicality.

I have a 340GB and 400GB HDD, currently with 6 partitions spread between them:

hdd1:
c: Windows XP- 10GB
d: Swap - 4GB
e: Main storage for programs and my documents

hdd2:
f: Main storage for music and videos
g: Local server - 5GB
h: Swap - 4GB

\"Swap\" is the result of a rumour I heard that for each hard drive, keeping 4GB spare for Virtual Memory. I wanted to keep programs in a separate partition to windows, so that I could reinstall windows and not worry about having to reinstall programs afterwards. So far this setup served me well apart from 2 things:

1) Despite changing system directories, some programs still insist on installing to \"c:\\program files\"
2) When I reinstalled windows recently, everything has just gone wrong since. Firstly, the computer now takes 30 mins to shutdown, secondly, a couple of days ago all my icons disappeared from the start menu, and then a routine registry cleaning caused half of my programs to vanish from the start menu, and a load of settings have been corrupted. So I\'m guessing these 3 problems are all linked some how with some root problem, hence keeping the programs in a separate partition hasn\'t helped at all.

So does anyone have any suggestions on the ideal partition set-up?

Doesn't Windows use the partition it's on for swap? I have no problem putting programs into a different partition then Windows but it's a bit of a pain having to change the default for every installation, although I do that for games anyway since I don't want them mixed up with my applications. It's also a good idea to put your "My Documents" folder on a different partition then C: so you can format it without loosing your precious projects, which also can be said about games and apps, some of them must be reinstalled or repaired though.

I do wonder how wise it is to create multiple partition in this day and age. Before when we had FAT32 each cluster would get really big on a large partition so you made partitions to use your space better. It sure is a lot faster to defrag and scan smaller partitions then larger ones. I don't know what the case is with large drives though.

10 gig- main OS
10 gig- anouther OS
rest - /home

use other one however you want.

as far as I know, only Linux and outher Unix like OS,s use a swap partition, and in these cases it needs to be formatted as swap.

No, you can move the swap partition in windows (and in linux).

Anyway, 4gb for that is sort of overkill. I use 2gb for vista (I have 2gb of ram), and 2gb for linux.

However, on my uncle's computer which has 4gb, there's no need for a swap partition in linux, so I have it disabled.

If it were a windows machine, I'd probably set it at 1gb swap if I had 4 gb of ram since some programs have issues working with no swap in windows.