Vista? Hello or goodbye?

[Martin Naef]

Hi Dave

On 10.05.2011 02:38, Dave S wrote:
> This one came fully tricked out (4GB RAM, 500GB HDD, webcam etc.) but
> has Win Vista Business 32bit installed.

I've run my system on Vista for a while before I upgraded to 7. Although 
I do prefer Win7, I don't think Vista is half as bad as some people make 
it out to be. Nonetheless, I'd vote for an upgrade as well, but I 
realize that money is tight.

> Essentially, I want to repartition the hard drive so I can dual boot
> with Linux Mint Debian Edition.  I've managed this OK-ish so far, in
> that using various tools and by turning lots of things like Hibernate
> and Restore Points off, I've been able to squish the Vista partition
> down to "only" 330GB - despite the fact that only 20GB of it is
> actually containing any data.

That's still not good. I've been successful at squeezing Windows 
partitions by using a good defragmenter (not the one included with 
Windows...) that consolidates free space at the end of the partition.

One option to consider: Connect the disk to another system and run a 
defragmenter on it. You might be able to move more files if it's not the 
active system disk.

> This isn't really good enough for me! I always keep my system and my
> data files separate, and with this much hard drive space partitioned
> (seemingly irrevocably) to Vista because of unmovable system files
> like (the empty) $Badclus which is sitting there bang in the middle of
> the drive like a stupid unmovable blob, I'm finding that I'm seriously

Is it really empty? Do the disk statistics report bad clusters?


> considering wiping Vista off here and putting XP Pro on instead for
> music making, if only so I can set up a sane (safer) hard drive
> partition scheme.

I wouldn't bother with XP anymore, certainly not on a new install.

Martin