Image new Win 7 for preparation of Skyrim?

[lostboykev]

I currently have Windows 7 64bit installed on my lapy. Now that it's coming closer to the release date of Skyrim, of which I preordered already, I've been thinking about dual booting a SECOND Win 7 instance on my computer specifically for Skyrim. I would probably allocate 75GB and have it as my second partition.

What do you guys/gals think? My goal is to get as much performance out of my machine, by being willing to take any steps possible.

Just to give you an idea of what I'm running on, here are my hardware specs:

i7-2630QM 2.0-2.9GHz
nVidia 540M GT GDDR3 1GB
750GB 7200RPM HDD
8GB DDR3-1333MHz
15.6" 1366 x 768

I thought it would be a good idea to isolate the game from my everyday workspace as I tend to install, remove and modify many aspects of my system.

So my questions are, is dual booting a sane idea and are there any other suggestions of tweaking my installation to accommodate my only MODERATE specs?



UPDATE:

I just installed a fresh Win 7. Removed some services and tweaked some settings. Also OC'd my GPU a little bit to.

Here are my 3dmark06 scores:

[Meridian]

I'm struggling to to work out why you want to do this? Any tweaks which will have any realistic effect will be done in the .ini file, so tweaking Windows won't do much.


M

[TheGlasMan]

I don't see much sense in a seperate partition.

A) the mobile windows (my lappy's won't accept a generic windows) may not let you do it.

B) it requires a full format wiping out your current install (doesn't seem to be a problem for you) PS make sure you have enough room available for your swap file.

C) I don't see any gain in stability, the game is least likely to get messed up and is easy to reinstall. With your 8GB of memory extra services etc shouldn't slow you up as there is plenty of room (system only needs 1 GB)

But no reason not to try if you want.

[Fastamdman]

It's really not a necessity but if it's something you want to do then do it. I am the type of guy who formats every other week lol. I love the "feel" of a fresh system even though the majority of it is in my head lol. I also kinda wanna dual boot with unbuntu 11.10 now since I have been enjoying folding in it for awhile now.

Either way the choice is yours but its really not needed and won't effect anything.

[ozzy983]

Late to this thread, but I don't understand the reasoning behind this; if it was a separate physical drive, then maybe, just maybe I could see doing this. However, creating another partition is already putting it on a slower portion of the hard disk (assuming it's not an SSD), so any performance you could reasonably gain by disabling virtual all non-essential services, is lost through the slower section of the hard drive.