Hello I am Anna 17 years old I'm still a newbie to the PC this is my first experince with a computer.I need some advice and help on partitioning my HDD Western Digital 120.0 GB 8 MB buffer.How big is the first partition C: using Windows 2000 Profesional service pack4 . 7GB will give my the full speed for this operating sistem told someoane.Is it true? Grater will be allocation slower the running Windows...Is it true? I am looking for some sweet advice on this as I wish to do it right the first time. Thanks for all the help... Yours faithfuly, Anna

Hi Anna. I agree with your intention of partitioning your large HD. I have a similar 120Gb Maxtor that I've partitioned C:(W2000, programs) 32Mb, D: (Music files, data) the remainder. Don't make the W2000 partition too small - you'll regret it later if you do. I'd say 7Gb is way too small. There isn't any "optimum" size for the W2000 partition. You want it big enough for OS and programs, with plenty of room for growth.

Anna If you intend to use NTFS file system then the partitions size isn't as critical as with FAT32. The default cluster size with NTFS is 4Kb. There are two anvantages to partitioning your drive. First is the fact that you will be able to format or clone any partition without touching the rest of the drive. The smaller the partition is the faster the average seek time is. Also faster to defrag and surface scan. I would recommend that you create a partition large enough for the OS and updates, just as you figured. I have win2000sp4 on a 6.29GB partition along with some other programs and I am using 4GB. That said, 7 should be plenty. If you intend to use a backup program like ghost you have to image the entire partition. This doesn't matter if you only have that 4GB of data or so. If you make the partition too large though, you will end up installing other programs on there and will end up creating a larger backup. I would recommend checking out partitioning strategies at radified.com/. Basically you want to think about what need to be backed up and what doesn't. For instance MS office really doesn't need to be backed up. The entire suite is on a disk that you have, and you should be saving your files elsewhere, usually My Documents. If you intend to save many large files like video for instance then create a larger partition for that. Hope this is of some help.