Suggestions how to partition my harddrive?

*finally* getting my MBP tomorrow, it'd have a 200GB 5400rpm HDD. I'd be dual-booting both Mac OS X 10.5 and Windows Vista...it'd be mainly used for schoolwork and playing games. Initially I only planned to use Windows Vista, but seeing how I got a better deal for the MBP (plus it's relative light for it's size) I figure I'd start trying to use Mac OS X more for schoolwork. (iWork maybe?) So anyway, do you guys have any suggestions how to partition my HDD? I'd be playing lots of games on it...the rest would be Mac OS & Vista software, some music, movies, pictures (not very big).

Thanks.

 

Are you playing games under OSX or Vista? If so that will determine how much space you will need... ie add up the space requirements for each game+vista then add some more say 5Gb for free space. If your gaming under OSX then perhaps running vista virtually (eg parallels) might be a better way to go and then just have the one partition. I used to be a two partition man, but now with timemachine I feel more confident to just have the one and be done with it, as I was always "guessing" and running out of space on one hdd.
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ps everything vista can do mac can do you even have office08 now, so I would really consider giving the os a go...as a recent switcher it was the best decision I ever made.

 

Planning to play my games under Vista.

Was thinking of something like this actually...

120 GB to Vista + software + games
40 GB to OS X + software
40 GB to a shared partition where I keep my music, pictures, software and schoolwork.

 

I've been using the dual boot since I got my MBP back in September and I can say that I use windows less and less every day, especially now since I have office 08 for mac. I actually started with Vista, but just last night reformatted and went with XP because it runs faster and is more compatible with some of the engineering software I need for school. At any rate, I recommend that you give yourself more room for OSX, because I think you'll find you use it quite a bit more than you expect!

I have the 120 GB HD and have the following partition scheme:

~65 GB "OSX"
~26 GB "media space" partitioned as FAT32 so both OS's can read/write to it
~21 GB "windows XP" partitioned as NTFS

 

Thats alot of space for vista... which makes me wonder do you really want a mac? If gaming is your thing then there are cheaper "pc" systems that will give better performance/cost ratios, and then you don't have to worry about the partition issue.
If you want a mac then you should really consider using OSX as your main OS, otherwise the point of a getting mac is well pointless.
I would also ask if vista is really a good choice? Most games will run as well if not better under XP, and from all that I have read about users with bootcamp, xp is just a much nicer experience than vista. It takes less space and the video drivers are much more stable and polished. I read a recent article that detailed that the majority of all the user-experience problems with vista are due to poor video-card drivers from nvidia and to a lesser extent ati, for me vista is definitely a wait till sp2 OS.
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