>I am buying a notebook with 100 Gb hard drive. I presume that the manufacturer will have just one partition, C:, when I get this notebook. I prefer to have 3 partitions of my hard drive: C:, D:, and E: (somewhat equal in size).
>
>My question is, can I partiton the drive using built-in feature of XP Pro without uninstalling the OS and all the software that will be on the PC? Or, in order to do that, do I need to buy a commercial software for partitioning?

If you partition a drive with the WinXP (or any Microsoft partitioning tool) the data and OS will be deleted. Use Partition Magic to preserve the OS/Data.