I have windows 2000 professional OS. My c: drive is currently 3GB and there is 17GB of free space. How do I resize the c: partition to include the 17GB. Is there any way of doing this without having to buy a Partition Manager?

I beleive there are free open source partition re-size apps in linux. You might have to get a distro of linux on a bootable CD to do it easily, but it can be done. (For some reason I'm thinking the redhat install disk, by default, can manage partion sizes. You might want to look @ downloading that.)

The big question is why bother at all. 3 GB's is a perfect partition size for your operating system. Simply use Disk Manager to create another partition with the 17 GB's of free space and install all your software to it instead of C: This will keep defrag time down to a minimum and since C: is the drive that will require the most defragging, best to keep it as small as possible. Once you have all software installed to D:, defrag it once and it likely won't ever need it again for weeks...maybe months. This is how I always do it...separate partition for the OS and another (or more than one) for software, saved files etc. The only drive I ever need to defrag regularly is C: The rest don't require much defragging unless I install/uninstall a lot of software.

Linux my foot! If you want to do all this easily and with no risk, go to www.paragon-gmbh.com, download a trial version of Hard Disk Manager and do anything you want. Partitionmagic is also excellent but the trial version does not actually effect the changes that you do, so it is useless.

Also, be careful of the trial version of Partition Magic. I've found it has a tendency to hang when it finishes and it really messed my system up.