2 Q's here, with new laptop:

1) How much will W7 shrink?
2) With 8 G ramsticks, is swap space necessary? (if so, how much?)


I got a new Dell w/ W7, 8G ram and 1Tb hard drive.

W7 shrunk itself to about 485 G on the drive. I formatted the leftover, re-booted, and tried again to shrink it. It wasn't interested in shrinking further.

So now, load Linux on the free space, and try shrinking from Linux Live environment???

and...

With 8 G ram in the machine, is ANY swap space necessary? If so, how much?

Suggestion used to be swap = 2x ram, but is it different now?

Windows will only shrink its installed partition to half the original size. There are ways around that, I dont know what would be more risky- using hacks to get around the shinking limit, or using a non-windows way to shrink the partition more.

Swap = 2x RAM is still Ok in some situations. You wont need 2x RAM swap size with 8GB iMO. You can possibly get away with no swap at all. If you want to suspend to disc, you will may need up to RAM size + a tiny bit more.

I wouldnt create a swap of more than 10GB for an 8GB RAM system, and in many cases I would go for a much smaller (2-6GB) swap partition.

Ah yes - cascade the hardware guru!

I expected 2G swapspace would suffice...

And W7 allocating itself half of my drivespace? Nothing like the gluttony for hardware of Windows... But why / how will it not reduce itself by half a second, and third time, etc.?

Note: if you are doing programming or other activities that could potentially create a core dump then you will need a swap space at least twice the size of RAM. The reason is that when the kernel dumps the core memory it dumps all the memory, the relevant pointers and the debugging info to the swap space. In total this can be twice the size of the current memory (or more though rarely). If the swap file/partition is insufficient to hold it the kernel will not care or check but simply dump the data to disk, potentially overwriting the drive with the extra data. HDD space is relatively inexpensive in terms of resources so sacrificing a bit extra to swap should be a problem and can potentially prevent a larger one.

I almost never create swap partition but it depends on the services and amount of ram you could use. You can always consider a swap file or partition later if you see memory getting low. 8G is a lot for a desktop user and not much for a server.

I tend to suggest that you use windows to shrink windows. I guess you could run disk clean up and see how much you can get rid of. Look for older restore points if you want to live dangerously. Make a backup using windows 7 backup before you get too far along.

While windows disk management software is good it will only shrink upto half of original size, it doesn't allocate 50% of drive. As long as windows is operating as it should not requiring chkdsk you can shrink it quite a bit more with gparted-live-cd.
Gparted can shrink it to it's smallest size & leaving a small reserve of space for wins7.
How much data does wins C:\ drive hold & how much reserve are you trying to have?

LOL, thanks. Dotn let TobiSGD see that ...honestly, he probably knows at least as much about hardware as I do.

Because windows keeps a reccord of how big the original install partition was.

In a lot of cases, yes. But not always.

I thought that even if you did a full user mode core dump, it would bigger than your used RAM but not up to twice as big. I really dont know, I'm not a programmer and I dont recall ever getting a core dump under linux at all. Thanks for the info, I'll try to remember that.