Need help "rebuilding" my Acer 8204 - Page 2

Hi bud,
There is no freeware out there for partitioning, or rather, there isn't one that I know of. However, partitioning is a 10 minute job, and to pay money for that is ridiculous. I would recommend downloading the trial version of acronis diskdirector from here : http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing.../diskdirector/
If you can't get it to work, PM me and I will try to help you.

I would reccommend pirating Partition Magic if you only need it for a couple minutes. Ya you antipiracynuts heard me, PIRATE IT.

Edit: YARRRGHHHH !!!

I'll let you go this time Chakz

To each, his or her own. As I've said numerous times there's no right solution for everybody.


The swap file is still on the same physical hard drive, which doesn't become faster just by partitioning it differently. Placing the swap file on a different physical hard drive - that would make a difference.


Placebo effect. All you're doing is taking away RAM that applications could have been using, making it more likely they'll use swap instead - but then they don't have enough swap available.


Just one of the reasons why the above is inadvisable.


As I said, fine. Might be a good setup for you.


Why do so many people in this thread have such frequent problems with viruses and spyware, but believe they're qualified to comment on other issues, is what I'm wondering...


No, I won't disagree with you. If you're not able to keep viruses and spyware off your machine, keeping multiple versions of your system that you can roll back to is probably a good thing, even if it greatly reduces the hard drive space available to you.

As I keep saying though, there's no right solution for everybody.

Remember that you don't have to buy full retail, either - I found Partition Magic, current version, for $18 via pricegrabber.com as an OEM disk (rather than $70 or $80 list). Worked great, took me about 5 minutes to merge C: and D: partitions into a single one, and it works fine.

It wasn't worth list price to me, but was worth $18 - now I have it to use again, if my needs change.

@gweilo, just two things, 'cause I don't have a time:
- swap file even on the same drive, but on it's own FAT16 partition on the fastest part of disk WILL improve speed compared to paging on random part of one big NTFS partition.
- I don't understand what is so strange in virus infections. Virus definitions are available slightly later than viruses themself, so there is always a chance to catch one, even with good heuristic module. We are not talking about permanent system crashes caused by viruses - but virus infection could potentialy cause one, right?
BTW, do you have spare weel in your car?

Any difference in speed between a properly optimised single partition install, and a mutiple partition install with the swap file on a separate partition, will be negligible. What you don't understand is that your FAT16 partition is just some "random part" (as you put it) of your hard drive - in exactly the same way that it would be when formatted as a single partition. Your limitations are still the read speed of the drive, and the time taken to move the heads from whatever was last accessed to the relevant part of the platters to read / write the swap file, then process that data, and then go to the next location on the disk for the next file access.

That's why putting the swap file on a separate drive is advantageous - it saves you the time in moving heads back and forth between different locations on the disk. It is also why RAID 0 works, because you can combine the read speeds from multiple drives reading / writing data in parallel with each other.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redunda...t_disks#RAID_0


Yes, as I have said several times, scanners are only one part of the process. You also require educated users who are intelligent enough not to run programs whose provenance is unknown, and admins who are intelligent enough to keep their systems patched, secure, firewalled, and properly configured so as to minimise the risk of an infection (and the potential for damage should an infection occur).

The fact you guys are so frequently getting viruses suggests to me that you're lacking some or all of the above.


Yes. What does that have to do with this discussion? My spare wheel doesn't hinder my ability to get the best performance out of the other wheels on the car...