Mac/Bootcamp partition size for basic Director’s Cut install

[mitohund]

Good morning!

I spent a good day or two now browsing this forum as a form of structured procrastination from studying. And finally I came to the conclusion that I won’t find my answer without asking and should get back to studying anyway.

So here it comes.

I’m planning to install the Director’s Cut via Bootcamp on my mid-2009 MacBook Pro 13″, Core 2 Duo 2.53Ghz, 4GB. In fact, I’m downloading it right now (via an annoyingly substandard Aussie Internet connection).

The question now is: how big should the Win partition be?

I’m not going to do anything massive on it. I really just need it for those occasions when there’s simply no way around using Windows. Like filing for an Aussie tax return. I won’t even install Office or Photoshop. And since disk space is always more of an issue in a laptop than in a desktop, I don’t really want to “be safe and go for 100GB”. But on the other hand, I have no idea how much WS2K8R2 grows with time.

Awesome forum by the way! Stole waaaay too much of my time already…

Cheers

[halladayrules]

I’m sure you are aware of the following:

You will need a minimum of 32GB of free space for the installation.

My server 2008 workstation (not R2) is fully loaded with all my programs and I’m using currently using 54GB out of 465GB (500GB HDD) on my machine. Here’s a list of some main programs installed on my machine:

Yahoo Messenger
DivX Player
Roxio Easy Media Creator
Flight Simulator X
ESET NOD32
Malwarebytes
Microsoft Office 2003
Microsoft Office 2007
Google Chrome
Mozilla Firefox
Total Video Converter
Orca MSI Editor
WinRAR Pro
PowerISO

Currently 932MB is dedicated to User Data and 28.8GB is dedicated to Programs. The remaining is dedicated to reserved system files and system restore points. If I can fully load my machine with a crapload of programs and only use less than 60GB then a 60GB partition should be plenty for you. A 60GB partition leaves you with at least 28GB of free space to work with. Plenty good for R2 and your needs.

[mitohund]

Hey halladayrules,

Thanks a lot for the info. Helps a lot indeed!
Just a quick follow up: how big are your page file and hibernation-reserve-file (forgot what it’s called)? And are they included in your 26GB of Windows/user data files?

So somewhere between 32 and 60. Good to know. I might go for 40-50 roughly then.

Cheers!

[michal]

In my case both the files pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys don’t exist. I simply got rid of them.
I don’t use the paging file because of my experience with Win XP. After disabling it my computer became much faster.

[mitohund]

Hmm… this is interesting. Thanks michal.

I read around a bit about pagefiles and Win7 and pagefiles generally, and I must say I simply didn’t know I could disable the pagefile entirely and PROBABLY get away with it. Definitely worth a try. That would make my partition quite a bit smaller, which leaves me more space on the Mac-partition. And that’s the one I do actual work on.

[mitohund]

I hope I’m not spamming this board with the same question (I found some old threads about the topic), but I just installed the Director’s Cut and it does not accept my Dreamspark product key.

Is there any way I can downgrade from Enterprise to Standard Edition?

If not, are there any pre-modded Standard Editions around? I’m not sure I want to mod everything myself.

Cheers!

[Author]

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