When installing xp prof. I am asked to format either fat32 or ntfs(not sure these initials are 100% correct).Which should I choose?? I'm on a 1600xp desktop with a modem connection for occasional use.Mainly used for games and photo storage (leisure purposes) and for my sole use (no network). My last system was win98se which I think used fat32 but it wants to format ntfs. Thanks Steve

NTFS is designed for NT OS and is meant to have more security features and be quicker than fat 32. The downfall about having NTFS is if your system crashes it is harder to get to the data. If you format your drive as fat32 you can access you data simply with a DOS OS disk. My preference for my home PC is fat32 because it is more versitile but you can format the drive in either format and you will not really notice a difference in your daily routine software.

cheers Andrew for the good advice

Yes, I would choose Fat 32 for a home comp as well. Also I have herd that NTFS is not very good on hard drives less than 20 Gig.

but, wasn't windows XP made to run off the ntfs fat as well?

You can use Fat32 if you want XP also beside a Win9x or ME and want to share files and partitions, cause Win9x and ME are only Fat32. An important thing of Fat32 is the fact that it can't handle or store files larger as 4 Gigabite, so for making video's it's not enough. With NTFS you can work with terrabytes. So neither one is bad, it works both fine, it depends on what you're intend to do/create with your comp. I'm using both of them on my comp for different purposes. NTFS for making video's and Photo-series and security stuff and the FAT32 for home use..., but both XP-pro and it works fine.

NTFS is better if u have massisve amounts of files on the drive (at least 20,000 files, size doesn't matter). i ran fat32 for a while, but then did the (one way) conversion to NTFS and recovered over 1/2 of a gigabyte free space. Fat32 takes a lot of space to keep track of the locations of files, while NTFS is next to nothing. Still tho, my trusty win98 boot disk won't be saving my @$$ again for a while, but there's always the winxp recovery console.