[Rand al Thor]

Right, two questions here.

My Windows install is, I think, coming to the end of it's life. It's starting to take a while to boot up, is doing some funky things with file type associations and some codecs and the windows folder has swelled to over 5gigs. So first off.. can anyone suggest any methods/programs to completely restore windows xp pro to pristine condition? And since I don't expect that to be possible in any way, does anyone use XP Pro 64 bit edition and is it worth installing that? I'm getting a Athlon 64 FX-60 cpu soon and have a Athlon 64 3700, so running it will be no problem but does it mess up backwards compatibility or fail to run many programs/games?

Or is it no different from the 32 bit version? Any thoughts?

[Martinus]

Driver support is nowhere nearly as good, a lot of games have issues running on XP64 and I doubt the level of performance in spreadsheets will win you over.

In short; no.

[Rand al Thor]

Hmmm, yeah. I'm doing a little searching on these boards and others and 'problem' seems to be the definative word.

Right, I'll stick with XP Pro. I also want to set up a dual boot, with a linux distrib. I've got a couple downloaded already so which is the best of these five to use? To be honest I probably wont be booting into it that much but I want to get some experience with it again.

Gentoo, Debian, Slackware, Ubuntu and Fedora Core. Anyone have any other suggestions?

Also if anyone knows any walkthroughs/guides and boot switching software I'd appreciate it.

[Martinus]

The best way is to partition your HDD into two seperate chunks, one for windows and one for linux, install windows first as you'll be wanting linux's boot loader to overwrite window's boot segment (unless you have 2 seperate HDD's, simply boot the linux one from the BIOS).

Gentoo is a good learning experience, you have to muck about quite a lot to get results, they have forums where you can get a lot of assistance in case of fubar's.
Debian has an excellent software repository system and is very stable and well supported.
Slackware I've never used.
Ubuntu is very popular at the moment, large community, debian based and aimed more at the people who don't want to have to learn so much about linux in order to use it.
Fedora core uses a packaging system that I'd call flakey. I've never really like dit and find it difficult to maintain.

Most of the distros will have a description of how to set the bootloader up to dual boot.

[Rand al Thor]

How much space would be needed for an average install of one of those OSesesseseses? (Sorry). And can they all read NTFS? I mean, when I boot into the linux os would I be able to access my data drives as normal? And yeah that means I do have multiple hard drives but only the primary one is partitioned so I'll probably (try and) dual-boot from that.

[Martinus]

Ummm, piece of string length type discussion there I'm afraid.

I'd say you could comfortably install all of them and a lot of apps in maybe 5gigs. Refer to each manual though.

Linux needs a swap partition to work well, unlike windows which pages memory from whatever part of free HDD space it can find linux has a dedicated partition for this. You'd probably start out with boot, root and swap partitions for linux.

As for NTFS, most mainstream distos can read, some can write but there are provisos; from what I can remember you can only replace a file if it's file size is identical.

[Bob-san]

Just go for Vista; WinXP x64 is pretty much useless to 99.9% of people; it is not worth getting if you haven't already got it. Just go with an Vista x64 install; Vista x64 drivers will be much more common then XP x64 drivers.

[Flaser]

Just go for Vista; WinXP x64 is pretty much useless to 99.9% of people; it is not worth getting if you haven't already got it. Just go with an Vista x64 install; Vista x64 drivers will be much more common then XP x64 drivers.

I wouldn't reccomend moving to Vista right now:
-it will demand more resourced to achieve the same performance
-driver support is still glitchy
-*ahem* have you got the money for that thing?
-no games ect. are out yet, which would make it worthwhile

As for partitioning:
-Set aside a partition for all your data, books, music, videos ect. - that way a system crash will be a lot easier to recover, sine you will be able to format the system partition.
-You may consider installing all your programs on a separate partition, that makes the system partition less valnurable, and makes it easier to indentify programs later on.
-Putting swap/paging/virtual-memory files on a separate partiotion is also a good thing. Though win32 is nowhere near as good at it as linux, it still helps to separate it from the rest. (While you're at it, set virtual memory to a FIXED size. This will cut down on fragmentation and even out performance).

[Rand al Thor]

-Putting swap/paging/virtual-memory files on a separate partiotion is also a good thing. Though win32 is nowhere near as good at it as linux, it still helps to separate it from the rest. (While you're at it, set virtual memory to a FIXED size. This will cut down on fragmentation and even out performance).

Are you refering to Linux for that or XP or both?

Basically my setup at the moment is;

Primary physical disk (250GB) split into three partitions (and then 3 other physical drives just for data).
C drive (37GB) with windows install and most of my program files
E drive (195GB) just games and data
5GB unformatted, which I'm going to use for linux.

So, my question is, will that 5 gigs be enough for the install and swap partition or will I just take more from the windows partition?

I'll be staying away from Vista for a while. I ain't never jumped straight onto something like this from the go, I just don't think it's worth suffering through the glitches. And all the reports at the moment just confirm it for me. Maybe in 6 months.

[Bob-san]

I'd say 8GB would be a good spot for Linux (Ubuntu at least).

[Turey]

I did 10 GB System partition for Fedora Core 6, but I'm using less than half of that.

One cool thing to check out is http://www.fs-driver.org/ , which will let you read and write to your Linux partition in Windows.

[Bob-san]

Just go for Vista; WinXP x64 is pretty much useless to 99.9% of people; it is not worth getting if you haven't already got it. Just go with an Vista x64 install; Vista x64 drivers will be much more common then XP x64 drivers.

I wouldn't reccomend moving to Vista right now:
-it will demand more resourced to achieve the same performance
-driver support is still glitchy
-*ahem* have you got the money for that thing?
-no games ect. are out yet, which would make it worthwhile

The point is future-proof. If you have some modern system (AMD FX-60) it would make more sense to install Vista x64. It's about the same price for Home Premium as it is for XP Pro. Drivers will come out, games will come out, and he will have the horsepower to run the OS properly.

[Gortef]

I'm using X64 at my home and I can say that IF one is not scared of fiddeling with drivers and software it's quite ok. Majority of the softtware and games do work with it perfectly (firewalls and virus protection aside of course). About performance increase, it might be so on the paper but ontherwise I dunno.

All I can say that it works, but might need some more work than the 32bit (depends on the hardware and software one is using).