Affordable RamDisk?

Hmmm... I can't remember off hand, but I think it's under 1 gig.

Another thing that would probably be a good idea to pick up is a cheapie UPS system for this in case you go the OS on ram route.

 

Somewhere in the neighboorhood near 1.6 Gig.

 

Yeah, ~1.5G sounds about right, but that's not counting the default swap file, is it? If you've got for instance 512M of RAM, there's a default swap file 768M large on C:.

I have a 5G partition solely for XP, and it's getting cramped(C:\Windows directory alone has bloated to 2.7G ATM)... 4G will take some tidyness and discipline, but I guess it's doable without too much trouble. On 2G I think it would be too much of a hassle for me to even try.

 

My Windows directory was the same size before I reinstalled last week. Installing Windows from a slipstreamed SP2 disc can easily shave 1GB+ off of a standard Windows install that has been updated to SP2. The amount of file duplication to enable you to uninstall SP2 or use system restore is absurd.

 

That is for just the OS files. I run on at least 3 different partitions: MainOS [3.4Gig], Swap/Temp/Docs [2Gig], Apps [10G+]. Getting a full install in under 2Gigs would be a nightmare. The 1.5Gig number was from the smallest install of the 4 systems I have running.

On my main system, I have base XP + SP1 + SP2 patches installed and I'm down to 975Megs free of the 3.4Gigs. The Temp/Swap 2Gig partition contains my 1G swap file + FF Cache + My Documents + My Pics and has 680Megs free. The App drive has my main applications installed and it's only using 916Megs. I also run a Development partition with programming environments etc which takes up far more. Of course the Game partition is using 50+ Gigs.

I need to do a fresh install of the OS using XP_SP2 slipstreamed to regain some of the space on the OS Drive. But even with that done, I'm not expecting it to free up more than 600 Megs.

This would be far more interesting if it was a cacheing drive controller.