We are developers of packaged software widely used in manufacturing – mainly production control systems. I have recently built a new tower PC to use for conversion work – taking older VB programs to VB 6.0 and VB 6.0 programmes to VB.NET etc. The hardware includes 4 GB RAM and two 500 GB Seagate Baraccuda SATA hard drives. Motherboard is a GigaByte EP41-UD3L with an Intel Dual-Core E7500 CPU running at 2.93GHz. XP Pro (SP3) is running using a 250GB partition on one of the hard drives. Microsoft Visual Studio (VB 6) and VB.NET 2010 are both running on that partition. The rest of that drive is unallocated space. None of the second 500GB drive has yet been allocated.
I intend to install Windows 7 Ultimate on the free hard drive, addressing all the RAM and the whole of the hard drive. I plan to operate the PC as a dual-boot system. My question is – given the freedom I have to make partitions etc. what would you suggest as the optimum configuration I should aim to create?