any tweaks? clean install, new external hd

[Steve_X]

I'm intending to do a system reinstall of XP when my new hard drive comes tomorrow. It's a Fantom G Force 1000eu with 1TB storage and eSATA connection. I'm considering using it for primary storage and using a partition on my primary OS drive (currently used for everything) for occasional compressed backups (of course, I'm not sure how effective the compression will be, so I may not have the room on my 400GB OS drive).

Anyway, I'd like to know whether there are any tips (such as creating partitions, moving the pagefile, etc.) for increasing performance in this situation.

Also, I'd like to know if you think I should forget about using the external drive for primary storage or pagefile and just use it as pure backup.

 

[Hampton]

Personally I like to make my partitions on a clean drive so I can allocate a partition for each OS and a partition for storage The XP install cd does this just fine. but if you have no choice but to make partitions on a drive with data you need to keep then there are a few different progs around that do this.

 

[carnageX]

GParted is the best free tool to edit partitions.

As far as performance tweaks...check the Windows area. There's a topic in the sticky that says "READ FIRST" about tweaking performance for XP.