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Illustrator with new laptop needs advice

E

eyewoo

n00b
Joined
Mar 24, 2005
Messages
4
I'm an illustrator. I getting a Dell 9300 laptop (2 gig RAM, 100 gig HD) My main program is Photoshop which uses a "scratch" disk when RAM is used up... which happens frequently. The laptop is coming with one partition on the drive, I want to create a second small partition (a few gigs) just for Photoshop's scratch disk.

The OS is Windows XP, home edition. Is there a way to create the partition using the OS or should I buy some sort of program to do it?

Laptop should be arriving tomorrow (Fri, 3/25). I probably should create the partition before loading software and data, right?

Thanks for any help...
 
Partition Magic will do the trick. PhotoShop will create a scratch disk right on your existing partition however and it is temporary.

If you get a regular Windows disk with your lappy you could just reformat, make a new partition as you like and NOT install all the crap they do from the factory.

Just some thoughts
 
BillR... Thanks for the info.

Some of my scratch disk files get several gigs in size. I'm working on large, hirez images, so with a fragmented main drive, the speed is slowed even more if the scratch is using the same drive.

I may try the reformat, though its not something I've ever done with Win XP... ? Bit nrevous about that...
 
What hard drive is in it now? Have you considered the 7200RPM 60GB Notebook drive from Hitachi?, that should help you out some as well.
 
eyewoo said:
BillR... Thanks for the info.

Some of my scratch disk files get several gigs in size. I'm working on large, hirez images, so with a fragmented main drive, the speed is slowed even more if the scratch is using the same drive.

I may try the reformat, though its not something I've ever done with Win XP... ? Bit nrevous about that...
Click to expand...


XP install is very straight forward, everything is done right from the main disk. I DO use a seperate partition for my scratch file as well as my IE cache. I agree this helps keep fragmentation at a minimum on the main drive.
 
At least on Newegg, I see 2 4200RPM 100GB drives, 1 from Toshiba and another from Fujitsu, and a 5400RPM drive from Seagate. Especially if you have one of the 4200RPM drives, stepping up to the 7200RPM Hitachi will be a huge performance boost, although you will lose some capacity (the largest in the series is 60GB), and the 60GB version of it is over $200. If you need all 100GB that you have now, the 7200RPM drive isn't going to help. Merely a suggestion from me.
 
If you're really serious about it, look into getting either the modular bay drive adapter (assuming your optical drive can be removed) and put DougLite's 60GB Hitachi in it, or get a firewire/USB2 pocketdrive of some type, and run the scratch disk on that. That way you won't have Windows and Photoshop fighting for the same physical disk - regardless of partitioning.

 
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