I'm setting up a complete .NET development environment on my Macbook Pro.
I'm using Visual Studio 08 team suite, SQL server 2008, MS Office and other tools (like FinalBuilder, RegexBuddy, Beyond Compare).
How big should my windows 7 (beta currently) partition be? Will 100GB be enough?
NOTE: I wasn't sure if this was programming related enough for SO, so I'll just let the community decide if this question is relevant.
100 GB will be plenty. You'll have OS, apps, but no music, pics, videos. 100GB is probably overkill, especially if you can resize it if needed.
100 GB should be more than enough for all those apps. I've installed win7 in a virtual machine and the virtual HDD ended up with a size of 7GB (that's only the OS of course). Trying the same with Vista, for example, uses about 25GB. It seems they're making it lighter.
You described my laptop. 100 GB would leave approx. 40GB for Users directory.
Windows7 is going to be a little bit smaller than Windows Vista. So if you create partition big enough for Windows Vista, it will be perfect for Windows7.
See Engineering7 blog for more information about disk space in Windows7.
I would give as much as you could to Windows 7, since it will probably become your primary OS. I find that I rarely use my OSX partition, except for cracking WEP.
I have Windows 7 installed on a laptop with 2 100 Gb hard drives. Currently I'm using 18 Gb and that's with most of the primary stuff installed, but not Visual Studio or SQL, but those probably won't use more than 10 Gb (I reckon). I do have Virtual XP Mode installed which is probably quite large too.
The Windows folder is about 9.3 Gb The User folder is 3.2 Gb (but I have some large files on my desktop) The Program Files is 3.0 Gb The rest of the files on the OS-drive are mostly driver files which you don't have to leave on the drive itself.
So 100 gb would probably even be an overkill, but does give you some headroom!