partition size for bootcamp recommendations?

I am in the process of installing bootcamp and wonder if there's a good size for the partition size to assign to windows. The default appears to be 5GB. I will be doing graphic applications via windows.

Any ideas?
Thanks!!

 

Using photoshop and illustrator?
Are you going to game?

I would recommend 10-15 gigs if your not gaming. Unless you store a huge amount of digital images and the like. It's really hard for us to say... how much do you use on your current windows machine?

Figure 5 gigs for XP and other basic apps plus about 2 gigs for photoshop and a few other graphic programs. More depending on if you use stuff like 3d rendering.

15 may work... then again, if you use a lot of apps, you may even need 30.

 

It all depends on what you will be using in Windows and how often you are using it. I partitioned ~14gb for software that is not available in os x such as visio, .net framework and a few important files. The clean Windows install uses about 4gb with boot camp, so go from there.

I tried to partition as little as possible because I didn't buy a mac to run windows and I ended up using 14gbs.

 

It really depends on how much data you will be storing. Figure about 10 gigs for Windows and your programs and essential data. Then decide if you want to store more data on that partition or if you will be using some sort of external storage.

 

I'm using photoshop, illustrator, sketchup, other animating tools, CAD, video editing....

 

thanks for your pointers.

Another question I have is how to identify which partition. I sucessfully assigned partition space, then started the process of downloading windows. that's where things went south. the download process asked me to identify which partition to save windows into, and I wasn't sure which one to choose as windows didn't appear to name the partitions. I was going to go by size of the partition, but then a warning came up saying by installing windows on that partition it would wipe out all prior existing information on that partition. So I freaked and stopped the process. I didn't want to wipe out my mac osx.

I'm a newbie to the mac and I really like my mac so I guess I'm taking extra care...

 

Only one of the partitions will be the exact size you partitioned it to with Boot Camp assistant though. And as I recall it showed the soon-to-be Windows partition at the bottom when I did my install, it's possible this varies though I guess.

Look at the size, that's the sure-fire way of identifying it. Unless you made it equal in size to the OS X partition of course. (I made mine around 40GB or so to accommodate games, since that's all I use Windows for - the rest of my 160GB hd is OS X)

 

Well, if you're doing video editing and 3d animations... I'd say make a 30-40 gig partition if you're not using an external hard drive. I hope you got the 160 gig drive...
Mine's only 100gig drive, but 7200 rpm. How I wish I had more space!

 

Also, don't forget to think about how much space you have in total, so that you don't run out of space on your OS X partition.