Win 7 Clean install - format drive and partition query

Yes Paul, You can Format during the beginning of the windows Installation.
Just pay attention to what you are formatting.

 

my 2¢

I'm going to assume you're a Linux guy since you referred to the windows pagefile as "swapfile". Linux just partitions the swapfile separate from everything; that's how Linux does it and it works great for that OS.

I would recommend wiping out the "C" and "D" partitions on your disk then installing 7 in the newly created space.

There is no point to separating your pagefile from your windows partition on the same hard drive. By default your windows install and pagefile are placed in the same partition. By placing them in different partitions on the same physical disk you are likely to get slower performance because the drive has to constantly read and write to distant areas of the drive platter.

The proper way to accomplish what you were trying to do is to actually have another hard drive (the faster, the better) to place your pagefile on; although even doing things that way is shown to only slightly increase performance.

Whatever you decide to do, back up your data before doing anything else.

Good luck!

 

Yes, repartition and reformat diring install if you so wish, In my opinion the only real advantage to having seperate partitions on the same drive would be for future reformat\install possibilities, and as windows does save all the old data on the partition by default (as long as you don't reformat\partition) that would likely be more an option if you were planning on using a different os in the future or perhaps wanted the data saved on a Fat32 partition to be accessable in Dos. just my 2 cents...

 

Yes and yes.

A seperate partition for data is a great idea - you can shift all your user data except "AppData" anywhere so create a users/username folder on your data partition and move all your data there by opening your username folder on drive C: and right clicking each folder inturn (eg My documents) and choose location form the popup menu press home delete to delete C: and replace with D: (or whatever) and let Windows move all your current data to the new location - this preserves "integrity" in the system and the libraries and other shortcuts etc will automatically adjust to the new settings.

I use a 60 GB system partition which currently has 45 GB free space with loads of programs installed and you can always install to the data partition if you need to.

Don't let anyone tell you not to have a data partition - a second drive is safer - but if your system goes "belly up" for any reason - and Windows systems do sometimes - your data should be safe and you can simply fresh install to the C: partition.