> Are there any other things worth doing to an NT installation?
These are my opinions and results from personal installations, I am not
an NT expert.
["Grain of salt" warning activated]
Don't let the install do the format it makes a FAT partition then converts
to a 512byte per cluster NTFS with it's layout having a gap at the start of
the drive where the FAT table was. instead fomat to NTFS prior to install
using 4kb per cluster.
Use a separate partition for all of the rapidly changing folders (Swapfile,
Temp folder, ...) and point all of the environment variables for those
folders to that other partition.
Never store data and OS on the same partition. Allow a separate partition
for data and remember to allow growth space in the OS partition for
application installation (or move program files to the data, change partition).
I run the NT scheduler running a CONTIG.EXE session nightly (2:00am)
over my OS partitions (contig is available from www.sysinternals.com)
which maintains their defragmented state well. Note that contig will only
work with significant free space (about 20% or more) on the partition since
it is a simple file mover which if it cannot find space to move a fragmented
file to will not create space by moving others (IE it does not move
non-fragmented files).
Also tools such as O&O Cache can improve file cache management
especially as memory grows over 64mb. SCSI devices generally use much
less CPU time for access even if the physical speed is not greatly faster,
this allows better performance from memory and allows applications like
O&O cache to cache files in idle cpu time. I haven't trialed O&O defragmenter
but Diskeeper 4.0 performed nicely if run regularly. Note that due to access
and structural rules of NTFS no NTFS defragmenter will perform very well
with nearly full partitions since the APIs (as I understand them, I'm not a guru)
only allow moving of whole file fragments which complicates the process of
defragmenting free-space.
Note that if you have a huge memory machine then NT server may perform
better as a desktop than NT Workstation does because it trades memory
for filesystem performance (approxiamtely another 16-32mb) which can be
well worthwhile (if anyone can afford to have nt server as their desktop ;))
--
Aaron Scott-Boddendijk
Jump Productions
(07) 838-3371 Voice
(07) 838-3372 Fax
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