[Sandwich]

Wait!  You can crack windows XP Activation?  OH PLEASE TELL ME HOW!!!!

You don't even need to crack it. Just let the ActiveX control install in IE, and then go to Tools > Manage Add-ons... and select the Windows Genuine Advantage add-on. Pick "Disable" at the bottom of the dialog and go update your computer to your heart's content.

[Martinus]

You don't even need to crack it. Just let the ActiveX control install in IE, and then go to Tools > Manage Add-ons... and select the Windows Genuine Advantage add-on. Pick "Disable" at the bottom of the dialog and go update your computer to your heart's content.

I think this wee work-around has been 'fixed'.

Irrespective, this isn't what he means by activation. Activation is where you log on to MS's server and authenticate your key. If you don't do it after 30 days your copy of XP becomes unusable, it kicks you out to the 'choose your account' screen.

The activation can however be disabled using a crack in safe mode, it's a very straightforward affair and the crack itself is widespread.

[Sandwich]

Oh, right, different thing. Oops.

Anyway, that work-around has worked around the clock for me.

[SadisticSid]

What I find funny is the BBC skewing the facts in this affair. They make it sound like its impossible to disable.

Personally I'm more disturbed by the fact that a security 'expert' is begging for back doors to be installed into an encryption scheme.

[Fury]

There's more crap in this thread than in unflushed toilet. Thankfully Nix already had the patience to correct most of said things.

[Nix]

CP5670, I hear you, I really do, but sometimes that's the only way.  I only do it after something's broken badly in the system, or it's hit my usual 6-month usage of my machine.  I usually do a re-format after 6 months, just due to how much bloat gets installed with all the programs and such.  I'm one of those guys who believes in partitioning and keeping everything seperate from another.  I've went as far as making a System partition, Swap partition, Games partition, Data partition, and Media partition.  Sure, I'm nuts, but I like things... seperated and organized.  This way, I can zap the System partition, and re-load the OS onto that partition, and run all the driver installs and such from the other partitions when Windows detects them.  Honestly, it's not a collosal waste of time once you have things seperated.  My downtime, from format to having all essential programs, utilities, and applications installed usually takes about 4-6 hours.  Of course, that depends on what you use normally, and you might use a whole lot more than me.  But for me, I'll just usually do it on a weekend with nothing to do, and it'll get done before class on Monday.

If people hate to activate just to get updates installed, you can look for a nice program called AutoPatcherXP.   I believe you can get it somewhere over at neowin's forums.  It's an all-in-one patch program with patches taken from Microsoft's library of patches, and includes some nice tools like all of the XP Powertoys and TweakUI.  It'll do a lot of other things for you, and you have full control over what's installed and what isnt.  If you have to go that route, that'll save you on the download time, by having all the patches in one neat and customizable package without having to download them over and over again through Windows Update.  Really useful for people on Dialup, if you can somehow get the packages off of a fast connection onto a big flash drive of some sort.  Best thing of all, it works without Activation or Genuine Validation.  (At least, it did for me, I cannot guarantee results across the board for everyone.)

[Flipside]

There's more crap in this thread than in unflushed toilet. Thankfully Nix already had the patience to correct most of said things.

That is because the article itself was misleading, That was the first I'd heard of the whole thing, so you can hardly blame us for reacting to the information supplied.

[Grug]

Though I guess we got a little zealous in the old 'Microsoft is evil' mantra.

Hey Nix, I've been planning my next install on a fresh hdd for a while now, and your system sounds familiar to the way I was planning.
Could I trouble you for some more details reguarding sizes of partitions, and where programs are rigged etc.?

[Nix]

@ Grug
One very very important note.  If you use the built in Windows File system Encryption, DECRYPT ALL FILES before you reformat, otherwise they will be unaccessable forever.  The only way to get access to them is to have a backup of the local keystore, but I'm not sure how this works at all, so just do it the easy way and DECRYPT any encrypted files before you reformat.

It's personal prefrence really.  I plan on my partitions to have at least 30% free space on them, to help curb fragmentation.  My system drive sits on my SATA drive which is 160GB large with the system/boot partition set for 20GB.  Windows and the Program Files sit on that partition.  I have a 300mb swap partition on there, but before you gasp in horror, I have a seperate 5 GB partition set up with a 3GB swap file put on it.  All of my programs are installed into the normal location, which is usually C:\Program Files with the exception of my Games which go in it's own partition.  Why do this?  Because, a lot of programs write registry entries, and a lot of times the programs will not function without the registry entries in the system.  Restoring an old registry backup would be silly, cause you're copying over the bloat again. 
The rest of the space on the SATA drive is halved, one with a storage or "scratch space" for my movie editing, compression, etc, and the other half for the games I put on.  I resize as necessary, but havent needed to in my previous builds.   The other two drives I have in my system are on thier own partition, two 80GB drives, one has all the music and movies on it, and the other one houses my archive of programs, utilities and drivers.  You can do the same exact thing with one monster drive, and the system will think you have a bunch of hard drives, even though you're on one drive.
And why do I go through all this trouble?  Because, it's a hell of a lot faster, and a hell of a lot easier to reformat a 20GB drive instead of a 160GB drive, and 2 80GB drives when it comes time for reinstall.  It also keeps stuff together, and a lot of times, saves on disk wear and tear when defragmenting, cause you're only defragmenting a 20GB space.  A lot of the data files and such never get fragmented, as most of it is just being stored, then zapped to DVD when not needed. 

Having Partition Magic helps speed things along smoothly.  One word of advice though.  Sometimes, if you reinstall, and have all your partitions visible, Windows might dump it's NTDETECT and BOOT.ini files onto a different partition than your system partition!  I've seen it happen before and it's a major hassle having that stuff all over the place, because your system becomes dependent on two partitions for booting.  The easy way to do it is set up all your partitions in Partition Magic, and HIDE all of the partitions except for the System partition, which should be at the very front of your disk, due to BIOS limitations.  When you run Windows Setup, it WILL detect all of the hidden partitions as OS/2 partitions, dont freak out cause that's how PM marks the partitions as Hidden.  Once you install windows to the system partition, and all is well, verifying that your NTDETECT and BOOT.INI files are in the System partition, go back into PM and Unhide the partitions.  Windows will detect all of the other partitions and data stored on them without any problem.  Keep in mind, you may have to reset ownership and permissions on a reinstall. 

Hope that's not too drawn out.  I am quite passionate about hard disk organization, as you can see.

[Grug]

LoL k. Little deciphering work there but I think I get how your system is rigged.

I had plans to do the following:
HDD 1: 120or160GB HDD ~ System and normal usage
Partitions:
C: ~ around 20 or maybe 40GB for System Drive. This holds windowsXPpro as well as assorted programs.
D: ~ Around 60GB or so for games and mods etc.
E: ~ Remainder of space hopefully at least 40GB for normal files and documents.

HDD 2: 80GB ~ Storage for media
F: ~ Media Drive for all things music, movies pics etc. (some pics would be in E too)
Y: ~ VM partition <10GB

HDD3: 80GB ~ Work ****
G: ~ Most likely work drive, keep work related **** in here.
Z: ~ Scratch Disk Drive <10GB

What you thinks?

[Triple Ace]

That would be good Grug. Just make sure your power supply can handle it.

[Martinus]

Personally, I keep the system partition at OS requirement + 2 gigs for Windows. Plenty of room and fast to scan/defrag. All of my programs go into D:\Program Files\*

Linux is a whole other barrel of monkeys.

Good tip on the encryption. I'd also add that quite  afew programs save their configs in "C:\Documents and Settings\[insert account name here]\*", if you can dig out the proper folder and back it up you can often dump it right back into the same place on a new install and have your program work as it was previously configured. (Firefox, GAIM etc.)

[Cyker]

Tangent: WinXP+SP2 is to WinXP what Win98SE is to Win98 - They're practically different OS'.

Installing SP2 on a used XP or XPSP1 system - ESPESCIALLY one that has had *any* post-SP2 hotfixes installed - will usually cause stuff to break and/or act funny.

I find with SP2, the best way to install it is to re-install Windows XP off a slipstreamed CD.

Most systems I deal with now have SP2 pre-installed and they're pretty stable.

[Grug]

Personally, I keep the system partition at OS requirement + 2 gigs for Windows. Plenty of room and fast to scan/defrag. All of my programs go into D:\Program Files\*

Linux is a whole other barrel of monkeys.

Good tip on the encryption. I'd also add that quite afew programs save their configs in "C:\Documents and Settings\[insert account name here]\*", if you can dig out the proper folder and back it up you can often dump it right back into the same place on a new install and have your program work as it was previously configured. (Firefox, GAIM etc.)

I was considering doing a OS seperate partition and a program files partition, but would that speed things up or slow them down?
Also what size partition would be best for a Windows only install?

[deftonesmx17]

@Grug

I'm not sure if it has any effect. This might sound nuts, but it is somewhat similar to partitioning. I have three 160GB SATA drives in my PC. One drive is for nothing but windows, office, and other progrqams like that(yeah it has like 151GB of free space that just sits there). My second one is for games only. The third drive is what I call my "stuff I need to keep" drive. I do this so when I do need to do a format and reinstall, I only lose windows, office, and other crap programs that take seconds to install, but do not lose any valuable data. I have not noticed one bit of speed increase or decrease having windows on its own "partition"(HDD).

A note about disk fragmentation.
I recommend a program called diskeeper. http://www.diskeeper.com/defrag.asp Never again will you sit and wait for your HDD to defrag because it does it on its own.

[Sandwich]

I long ago gave up on multiple partitions when I kept on running out of room in one, and found myself forced to store that video or game or whatever on another partition than the primary one for that purpose. Now I go with as few partitions as possible. As for reformatting... meh. Keep your Windows clean of extra cruft and it'll last until you need to get a new HDD anyway.

As for organization, however... I use folders in a certain way, which I parallel both on the drive and in the Start menu. On any given day, you'll find most of my programs filed away under one of the following folders:

• Games (...duh)
• Tools (Things like Text editors, WinZip/Rar, etc)
• System (things that integrate themselves into the system beyond mere file association, such as anti-virus and anti-spyware programs, Google Desktop, etc)
• Internet (web browser, email client, FTP client, IM program, etc)
• Multimedia (Generally audio and video players like Winamp, Media Player Classic, etc. A subfolder called "Codecs" when they get too numerous)
• Graphics (Photoshop, MAX, Rhino3D, etc)
• Hardware (Anything related to hardware directly: CD burning program, sound and GFX card drivers, etc)

Anything that doesn't fit into any of those categories I allow into the acursed 'Program Files', such as Acrobat Reader. I've also been known to have 'Mobile Phone' and 'Palm' folders at times as well. :)

[karajorma]

I have not noticed one bit of speed increase or decrease having windows on its own "partition"(HDD).

That's probably cause the first thing you should do is have the swapfile on a different partition or better yet drive from the OS.

[CP5670]

I basically keep four main folders: games, apps, files and utils. Everything is stashed in one of those.

CP5670, I hear you, I really do, but sometimes that's the only way.  I only do it after something's broken badly in the system, or it's hit my usual 6-month usage of my machine.  I usually do a re-format after 6 months, just due to how much bloat gets installed with all the programs and such.  I'm one of those guys who believes in partitioning and keeping everything seperate from another.  I've went as far as making a System partition, Swap partition, Games partition, Data partition, and Media partition.  Sure, I'm nuts, but I like things... seperated and organized.  This way, I can zap the System partition, and re-load the OS onto that partition, and run all the driver installs and such from the other partitions when Windows detects them.  Honestly, it's not a collosal waste of time once you have things seperated.  My downtime, from format to having all essential programs, utilities, and applications installed usually takes about 4-6 hours.  Of course, that depends on what you use normally, and you might use a whole lot more than me.  But for me, I'll just usually do it on a weekend with nothing to do, and it'll get done before class on Monday.

I actually haven't reinstalled XP at all since I switched to it in early 2003. I was thinking about having separate partitions at one point, but the problem is all the programs these days put their crap everywhere in the Windows directories and registry, so if you remove Windows, you're going to have to reinstall many of your programs anyway. It would take me at least two days of heavy work to get everything installed and set up the way it is now.

I don't need anything that SP2 offers at the moment, but if I get a dual core, I would have to upgrade.

[karajorma]

The point of partitioning isn't to stop you from having to reinstall stuff. You'll probably have to anyway. It's so that you can reinstall without having to back up everything first.

Furthermore you can image the (much smaller) partition and save that to a DVD or another partition. If you ever have a problem you simply copy the image back.

[Grey Wolf]

There's more crap in this thread than in unflushed toilet. Thankfully Nix already had the patience to correct most of said things.

* Grey Wolf gets no respect