Windows 7 with Ubuntu dual Boot

[Joe San]

Guys,

I'm planning to buy Windows 7 Home Premium and would like to ask here if anyone already uses it? Also does anyone here have a dual boot of Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.x.x? How good and fast would Windows 7 be compared to Windows Vista Home Premium as I find my Vista Home Premium a bit slow. Please give me your suggestions!

[Peter Johnson]

I dual boot my laptop with Win7 Professional and Ubuntu 9.10. I used to run Vista Home Premium and Ubuntu 8.10 on it. I find that Win7 startup and shutdown is much faster than Vista. I haven't really noticed that big of a difference in performance between Vista and Win7 in daily use, but then I never did any kind if timings either.

[Joe San]

Well, thanks for the post. I have 3 partitions on my machine. The partition that runs Vista is actually 100 GB and I just have Java, Eclipse IDE apart Vista on that partition and I can see that it already uses 40 GB of that hard drive. Is Windows 7 the same? Does it require so much space? I heard that just a 16 GB partition is enough for Windows 7 compared to much more that is required for Vista. Can you comment on these lines?

[Joe San]

Just ordered it and should reach me in another 3 days. Hope it is better than the Vista that I run now.

[Joe San]

Peter Johnson wrote:I dual boot my laptop with Win7 Professional and Ubuntu 9.10. I used to run Vista Home Premium and Ubuntu 8.10 on it. I find that Win7 startup and shutdown is much faster than Vista. I haven't really noticed that big of a difference in performance between Vista and Win7 in daily use, but then I never did any kind if timings either.

How much of HDD space did you provide for your Windows 7 partition?

[Peter Johnson]

On my laptop I have a 250GB hard drive. I allocated 50GB for Ubuntu, 4GB for the swap drive, and gave the rest (about 180GB) to Windows 7. On my desktop it is a little crazier because I have several drives and can boot XP, Vista, Win7 and Ubuntu. But there I settled for 120GB for the Win7 system drive - makes it more convenient for installing all the junk that I eventually put out there.

I never looked at the disk usage after installing Windows 7, and with all the stuff I have installed now it would be impossible to say how much it took up initially.

One thing you do have to plan for is the bloat that eventually happens: copies of installation files, restore points, patch uninstall folders, etc. That east up quite a bit of space, and very quickly. I originally had 50GB partitions on my desktop for XP and Vista but both of those eventually overflowed. That's why I went with 120GB for Win7. And after running with Win7 for 3 months (I installed the RTM as soon as it was available on MSDN) I am using only 45GB.

[Joe San]

But why does the microsoft website (http://windows.microsoft.com/systemrequirements) claim that only 16 GB space is enough for Windows 7?? Is it really so? I just have 160 GB HDD and I have decided to partition them as follows,

40 GB for Ubuntu
40 GB for My Applications
40 GB for Windows 7 (Really doubt if this would be enough)

My question is will this work?

[Joe San]

By the way, I ordered for a Ssyetm Builder version and how does that differ form the OEM package?

[Joe Ess]

Jothi Shankar Kumar wrote:But why does the microsoft website (http://windows.microsoft.com/systemrequirements) claim that only 16 GB space is enough for Windows 7??

That's just to install Windows 7 (and yes, the installer will fail if you allocate less than 16 GB). Only you can answer if 40GB will be enough. It depends on what you will use your system for.
I've been running Ubuntu 9.04 off an 8GB flash drive since May and it's not even 40% full. I keep all my data on a NAS, so all I have locally is the OS and some lightweight apps.

[Raghavan Muthu]

Though I don't have an exact statistics, have an convincing answer for your very first question and post in this thread Jothi.

I have heard that Windows 7 is very good in terms of speed/performance (guess they have heavily customized and/or reduced the components and their memory consumptions).

In terms of hard disk usage, as all others have said it purely *depends*. I personally tend to allocate >=20 GB for any windows partition due to the traditional facts. Yes, you are right in terms of Vista. I used Windows Vista Basic and then switched to XP back (mainly due to RAM speed)

[Peter Johnson]

I basically have 2 partitions on my laptop: Windows and Ubuntu. I keep all of my data on the Windows drive. In Ubuntu, I change the Documents, Pictures, etc. folders in my home directory to be soft links to the corresponding directories on my Windows partition. Similarly, on my Windows partition I create a c:\opt directory with various subdirectories. I use this set of directories as my workspace where I do all of my development. In my Ubuntu partition I create several soft link to refer to the corresponding directories in c:\opt. Thus since all of my working data is on the Windows partition I have a larger Windows partition. Perhaps is there was a decent ext3 driver for Windows I might be tempted to do it the other way.

40GB might be enough for a Windows partition depending on what you plan to install (some software such as games, video editing or Visual Studio can take up gigabytes of space). Also, do you plan to adjust the special folders (Documents, Pictures, etc) under Windows to reference your data/programs drive? I do a similar thing on my desktop to get my documents and music off of the system disk. And, of course, Windows 7 libraries come in real handy when having similar data scattered over multiple locations.

[Raghavan Muthu]

Peter Johnson wrote:In my Ubuntu partition I create several soft link to refer to the corresponding directories in c:\opt. Thus since all of my working data is on the Windows partition I have a larger Windows partition. Perhaps is there was a decent ext3 driver for Windows I might be tempted to do it the other way.

my 2 cents

[Joe San]

I should receive my Windows 7 in a couple of days. Hope I find it better than Vista.

[Raghavan Muthu]

Jothi Shankar Kumar wrote:I should receive my Windows 7 in a couple of days. Hope I find it better than Vista.

Heard that and looks like thats what it is promising to be! Good luck

[Joe San]

Woo...Got it today and installed it. It is simply amazing and I feel that the disease that I had with Vista is over. Windows 7 is far far superior in performance than Vista. The installation was also quite faster. Tomorrow I will dual boot it with Ubuntu. Hope it works great as well with Windows 7.