Need to partition wife's new laptop & reinstall Vista. For those that put Vista "alone" on C:, how large a partition should I give it to allow for updates and small additions, Plus enough room to still allow defrag (in future)? When I reinstall, will be getting rid of some of the "extra baggage" that they load w/ it. I don't load any apps into C:, but a few insist on installing there - no choice.

The Windows directory alone on my Vista installation is approximately 10GB .... YMMV! But I would still suggest a partition that is at least 3 or 4x as large.

I think the same way as Sabertooth does. If you have plenty of free space, make it 40 GB or at least 30 GB. After Windows Vista, I installed only essential software, such as Nero 7, HP printer drivers, Graphics card drivers, soundboard card drivers, PowerDVD7, Adobe Reader, plus several Windows restore points, about 15 GB of space is already used up. Regards SuatCINI

"When I reinstall, will be getting rid of some of the "extra baggage" that they load w/ it." no, Vista does not offer a customized installation, it's all or nothing. however, you can use vLite and create an installation disk to your likings without the 'extra garbage'.

extra baggage What exactly is it? If you meant the bloatwares & crapwares that comes with OEM preinstalled Vista, you can remove them one by one. If this is what you have, be aware that you will not be able to achieve what you want to do in this thread. i_Xp/VistaUser

When you buy a hp laptop at first you get all the crap that they put on it, with the hp laptop should come with a copy of vista oem. If you dont want that garbage on there and wish to re-install vista then you will not get that extra bloatware on there. Also with re-installing vista you might have to call microsoft and get it activated that way. Jim R