I am running Windows 7 on an HP Pavilion Slimline with Pentium Dual Core CPU E6800 @ 3.33GHz. It's a 64 bit with 575 GB free of 920 total on the C drive, and 1.35 GB free of 11GB total on the D drive which is set up as the HP recover drive.
The Windows 10 freebie upgrade ends in about 2 weeks. I am wondering if I should get it. My father upgraded from Win 7 to Win 10 already, and he doesn't like it. I have heard both good and bad things about it. I have also been able to avoid installing it by "accident" due to being warned in time about the sneaky tricks Microsoft has been using to force people to install it. I did some research and found that it is hard to undo the installation, and return to Win 7 because your Win 7 will have lost stuff during the upgrade to Win 10. Because of this I will only install Win 10 if I do it in a partition, so I can keep Windows 7, too. That leads to some questions.
1. First, it looks like my D drive partition, which is set up for recovery, should be made bigger. If so, how big?
2. How big a partition should I have for Win 10?
3. I also have a version of Linux on a disk from a relative, and have been thinking of setting that up in a partition, too. I've used Linux before, so that's not a problem, but I would like to know how big the partition should be for that, as well?
4. I am also thinking of making a separate partition for data files, and want to know how big a partition I should have for that. This is a personal, home use PC. The data I use it for consists mostly of personal paperwork, lots of pretty or funny pictures, a little music, and some videos put on by a relative. I will be deleting some of the videos. There are only a few games on the computer, that came with the system, as well as access to Wild Tangent Games, which also came with the computer. I don't use the Wild Tangent games much, and the other games are the usual card games, Majong, and a minefield knockoff, so basically the games don't use up much data memory at all.
5. Will all these new things take up too much of the computer's memory? If so, I can leave off the Linux OS until my computer gets an upgrade in memory, or I get a new machine, neither of which will happen soon.
I would appreciate some feedback from the computer geeks here, as I am not one. I can do some stuff okay, and will follow the computer's instructions for creating and sizing partitions, but it would help to know how big they should be.
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If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.
Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured, or far away.--Henry David Thoreau