Best Practices Setting up Xp Pro

I am an intermediate computer user but I am not familiar with setting up partitions. I have to reinstall my system due to operating system age issues & sluggishness. My personal policy is to try to ensure ease of maintenance, ruggedness against virus & malware infections, as well as ease of use from the start. I wish to reinstall the system & set up my system to meet those aims. I appreciate your thoughts & assistance because I find very little information about this, just bits & pieces here & there. I will set out my thoughts & then my system details.

Currently everything runs off a single drive with only one partition. I was thinking of keeping the second drive purely for backing up but I can be convinced otherwise.

1. I think that setting up a partition to hold the operating system (Xp Pro) & as little else as possible so that it can be reloaded easily is my first need.

Do the other installed programs have to reside on this partition?
What else?

How large & what format NTFS / FAT should it be?
Any security / performance enhancing items that can / should be put in place during install?
I'm not using linux but wouldn't mind looking at it some time.

Any other suggested partitions for swap file etc?
Sizes / format ?

2. I use an old form of MS Office but I set up a separate "FolderDocs" folder that it is set up to use for my documents rather than "My Documents" folder. This makes back ups easier. I think that I can put this folder anywhere, I don't think that there are limits on the partition it must be on.

3. I am now using Mozilla Thunderbird due to huge problems with Outlook Express locking up with large emails, damaged emails & emails with spoofed headers. I have set it up to use a separate "FolderEmail" folder. I think that I can put this folder anywhere, I don't think that there are limits on the partition it must be on.

I reinstalled Thunderbird once & lost all of our emails. I asked on the thunderbird site without any success on how to safely reinstall it & how to archive large numbers of newsgroup emails that I have. I would like to somehow separate them from the main email store for safety & to keep the mail email folder smaller & hence faster & more reliable but still be able to view & search the archived emails.

4. I know that some stuff is saved in the "My Documents" folder but it can be moved as well with some difficulty. Do you know of any issues or limitations with moving this folder?

5. Although I regularly use anti virus & anti spyware programs, I am not very conversant with deep security measures. Whilst an earlier load of Xp Pro that we had was set up for another user account as well as admin, this caused problems with a number of programs if we weren't running with Admin privileges.
Should I go back to using an extra user account?
Pro's & against's please. How do we mitigate program privillege problems if we have an extra account?
What other security measures should we put in place?

6. If I reformat my one drive, I think it would be safer to change my current to be the extra (E: or what ever) so that any missed information can be got back off of it. Is it a problem that it is already formatted as a boot drive with Xp or how do you set it up for that use? It didn't appear in explorer when I reformatted it although it showed up in a back up program window.

7. I had a Brother Laser Printer that died & it left some parts of its driver still installed because of a driver fault didn't fully remove the driver. I've also had a spyware hit in the past that took a lot of removing. Apart from System Restore, what can be done to overcome such problems? I've heard of images but how do you use them & how do you ensure that one hasn't got infected / corrupted as well?

8. I am thinking of getting a USB case for the spare drive (or another one) & installing it inside my system. I'd just plug it in during back ups so normally it would be totally isolated from the system. Any thoughts on that?

9. I read the article on Slipstreaming Xp with SP2. I'm on a slow dial up link & I got badly infected during a previous reinstall while I was getting updates. Is there any similar way of getting the updates as well?


My system is an Athlon XP 2000+, 512Mb RAM, Albatron KM18G Pro motherboard (based on the nForce2 nVidia chipset with integrated graphics & sound), 2 x 80Gb Samsung drives ATA 133, Pioneer DVD A09 RW DL burner, & an Adaptec 2940U2W SCSI card for an old HP Scanjet 5p Scanner.

We are running Xp Pro with SP2 at home. This is not connected to any network and we are logged in as Administrator (no other User Accounts exist) because we found earlier that extra accounts caused problems with many programs.

This Xp Pro system has all the latest operating system upgrades and has Service Pack 2 installed, the latest nVidia drivers from nVidia, the latest DirectX 9.0c etc. No memory or hardware conflicts are listed and the DirectX diagnostic says all is running correctly.

Although our system seems to be stable, we have had problems with a few RealArcade games in the past that appears to be a problem with nVidia graphics because turning off hardware compression often has fixed things.

I am currently still running Windows Live OneCare beta & Avast antivirus, all the time. The system has daily antispyware run of Adaware SE Personal, & Spybot - Search & Destroy is done every few days. It also has Spyware Blaster installed to have the Registry Bits set to help stop spyware being installed as well. Every week or two I do a free online test at one of the online sites. Mailwasher is used to delete suspect emails from the ISP server before downloading to our system.

ZoneAlarm Personal Firewall was previously used & will probably be reinstalled now (since onecare in not available outside the USA) as well as Microsoft AntiSpyware.

Many thanks,
Brian.