Partation Recommendation Needed -- Mac OS X & Windows Dual Boot

[tolive]

I plan to put a 160GB HD in my MacBook Pro C2D and install both Mac OS X & Windows.
I plan to use both Boot Camp and Parallels Desktop (maybe the beta version for now to support boot into the Boot Camp partition), that means, I plan to use Boot Camp to install Windows first, then install Parallels Desktop and configure it to boot from the Boot Camp partition Windows. I'd like to have a shared partition for exchanging files between Mac OS X and Windows.

As a newbie to Mac world, I'd like to get your suggestions/recommendations on how to partition the HD, size and reason if possible, also, is it necessary to have a stand alone swap file/page file partition?

 

[apfhex]

It all depends on what you'll be doing with Windows. I probably wouldn't create a partition any smaller than 10GB.

On the Mac side, I would say just have one HFS+ partition, I wouldn't create a separate one for swap/scratch files.

 

[e12a]

I have 15 gb for Windows XP Pro, and 2 modern games at the most (Company of Heroes and Counter Strike Source). 545 Mb free.

 

[cblackburn]

Depends what version of windows you want to run. I managed to shoehorn Windows XP into 5GB with Visual Studio .NET 2003. Windows Vista howevr will no doubt be more hungry.

Chris

 

[tolive]

Thanks guys!
I would say, I won't install/play games on my MBP, I use XBOX360. Also, I do graphic works in PhotoShop frequently, rarely do A/V editing. For Windows, I plan to install Windows XP SP2 for now to avoid driver issues, plus, I need to install FULL Set of Microsoft Development softwares including Office, all .NET SDKs, Visio, Project, SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005.
Because I work on full Microsoft technologies, basically, I'll use Mac OS X for home/personal use, use Windows for work at home or development works.
From the initial Mac OS X installation, I see it occupies about 20 GB, so I'm wondering, is 80GB enough for Mac partition? or is it a better idea to split the 80GB into two 40GB partitions, one for Mac OS, one for user data?