hello I need to do a clean install of xp I remember reading advice to keep xp on a separate partition from my data also remember something about the xp temp and swap files being on differant partitions to xp any advice ?

What size harddrive do you have? While it is not necessary to have your files on a separate partition, for ease of restoration in the case windows stuffs up it may be desirable. Having the swap file on another partition of the same harddrive is a waste of effort. The idea would be if you have more than one physical harddrive then put the swap file on the non-system disk. Theory being that it is faster to read/write from the second drive while using the operating system. XP needs about 2gb by itself and you will need extra room in your system partition for installation of other programs. I would recommend 8 to 10gb as your C drive for XP and then the remainder of the disk in as few or many partitions as takes your fancy. Just remember that in the event of a future disk failure it will not matter much if your files are on a separate partition if you don't have backups.

Simple. My rule of thumb is thus; Partition the drive into 4 partitions generally 2 10GB partitions, 1 2 GB partition (usually less I actually calculate this partition size based on 2 times memory in the system) and another partition with whatever is left. The first 10GB is the OS and system, and software programs (which get wiped and erased all the time during rebuilds) The next 10GB is for extra stuff, test or beta software and overflow once the first 10GB fills up. The BIG partition is for my data and other stuff. This gets backed up religiously. The last tiny partition is for the Swapfile or pagefile ONLY. Nothing else sits on this drive, and system restore, indexing, etc. etc. is disabled for this partition. On production systems I will also force the system to purge the pagefile on shutdown (this is also a good idea if you multi-boot and want to use the same partition for both OS's pagefiles. HTH, J.