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astral

macrumors member
Original poster
May 9, 2005
59
0
I've got a 1.83 MBP coming next week, which i plan on installing windows for the sole purpose of using After Effects. I have a 250 gig FW drive and a copy of Macdrive 6, so all of the scratch/data will be on there. How much of the 80 GB HD should I give to Windows? I know it will want 3 gigs for VM (I'll have 1.5 gigs RAM), and 1 gig (AE installation) but other than that, how small have you guys been able to get your Windows installations? I'm guessing a 10 GB partition will work fine, but I don't want to keep having to reinstall windows. if I run out of/have too much space.
 

bugfaceuk

macrumors 6502
Nov 10, 2005
415
13
astral said:
I've got a 1.83 MBP coming next week, which i plan on installing windows for the sole purpose of using After Effects. I have a 250 gig FW drive and a copy of Macdrive 6, so all of the scratch/data will be on there. How much of the 80 GB HD should I give to Windows? I know it will want 3 gigs for VM (I'll have 1.5 gigs RAM), and 1 gig (AE installation) but other than that, how small have you guys been able to get your Windows installations? I'm guessing a 10 GB partition will work fine, but I don't want to keep having to reinstall windows. if I run out of/have too much space.

So I set aside 15Gb on my internal drive, and created a FAT32 partition on my FW drive (I wanted to be able to access it from the Mac too) and that's been fine with just windows on the primary. All of that said.... I've hardly been running it for long, and Windows does like to "grow to fill available space".
 

timswim78

macrumors 6502a
Feb 8, 2006
696
2
Baltimore, MD
astral said:
I've got a 1.83 MBP coming next week, which i plan on installing windows for the sole purpose of using After Effects. I have a 250 gig FW drive and a copy of Macdrive 6, so all of the scratch/data will be on there. How much of the 80 GB HD should I give to Windows? I know it will want 3 gigs for VM (I'll have 1.5 gigs RAM), and 1 gig (AE installation) but other than that, how small have you guys been able to get your Windows installations? I'm guessing a 10 GB partition will work fine, but I don't want to keep having to reinstall windows. if I run out of/have too much space.

For NTFS Partitions - Just keep in mind that Windows likes to have at least 15% of a parition free, in order for the built-in defragmenter to work optimally. My opinion is to bump up the partition size to 20GB.
 

astral

macrumors member
Original poster
May 9, 2005
59
0
I'll probably just stick to 15 then, as with the amount of programs i'm installing should still leave at least 30 percent free (though since I wont really be writing data to it but the once, defragmenting is a moot point, yes/no?)

Thanks for the suggestions, though.


on another note the "3-5 shipping days" estimate for refurb mbp proved false:
It shipped in one day (yay!)
though the 2nd day of my 2 day shipping is saturday, thus will be bumped to monday, most likely the same day it wouldve arrived standard ground (booo!)

can't win em all, i guess.
on the bright side, fedex express doesn't leave the obviously marked expensive computer on the porch like fedex ground does.
 

MRU

macrumors Penryn
Aug 23, 2005
25,370
8,952
a better place
bugfaceuk said:
So I set aside 15Gb on my internal drive, and created a FAT32 partition on my FW drive (I wanted to be able to access it from the Mac too) and that's been fine with just windows on the primary. All of that said.... I've hardly been running it for long, and Windows does like to "grow to fill available space".

Yeah on my iMac I gave 30GB of the available 250 to windows and on my external 400GB MyBook (love those WD drives) I partitioned it directly in 2 and made one Mac format and the other Fat32 for Windows (and so I could read it on my mac too).

Works perfectly. Mac see's both partitions and windows only see's it's own.

If you dont want your Windows partitoned drive to be seen on your OSX desktop, in Windows rename your local disc to somthing like .windows or .local drive that way, when you boot up Mac OSX you dont see the drive on your desktop, though it's still accessable on your finder.
 
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