However, this of course does not always mean that the application won’t run. A lot of them will be running just fine without Windows ever knowing they are there. Games especially, since many of them don’t particularly care if Windows knows about them or not.

Some apps though will probably require reinstallation.

I guess if you have everything besides Windows in separate partitions then you can just use the desktop/Start Menu shortcuts to access your programs, but there must be some point in the registry where your programs are kept track of (otherwise it wouldn’t be possible for a removed program to still be there in Add/Remove Programs)

damn.. I mean yay.. or damn, I’m not even sure whether to be pissed or pleased

I would have difficulty knowing how much space to allocate to all those different partitions, and since you can’t move where a partition starts it would be pretty tricky to reallocate space for all 6 partitions without having to reinstall or do a complete backup/restore job.

You can move and resize partitions with ease. Pay for Partition Magic (old school) or even easier, use gparted. I’ve shifted partitions around a lot with gparted on my test machines using the gparted livecd. It’s extremely easy (read: I never read a man page and it usually works) and when it’s failed (rarely), it’s not destroyed data. That, of course, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t back up before using it on a non-test system.

It’s not something you want to do every day of course, and huge partitions do take some time to manipulate, but gparted does wonders for me.

*vacri waves a little gparted flag*

I wasn’t really able to get the balance right when I was just separating Docs and Settings from everything else (ended up with a fair chunk of unused space on the programs side, useful if I ever want to install around 15gb of programs, but not for anything else.

Doing it for Program Files, Docs and Settings, My Documents and email all at once.. now there’s something that would take a few goes to get right

I knew a guy who would religiously partition his drive into like 6 parts - one for Windows folder, one for pagefile, one for Program Files, one for Documents and Settings, one for My Documents and one for email files because he noticed that these files were changing the fastest, and causing the most fragmentation.

I tend to do this with all programs bar system utility types, more to keep them from filling the system drive and interfering with the pagefile than anything else (I’ve had that happen an annoying number of times in the bad old days). Oddly enough, I don’t do this with the documents and settings folders. *shrug* Humans, eh?

I will have to check that out.