>>>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).
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>>>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?
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>>>TIA.
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>>I don't know the answer to your partitioning question but will just say I used to think that way and have gotten over it. I used to have Windows and system utilities on C:, application software on D:, and data on E:. I finally realized the same thing can be accomplished with subdirectories of C:. And the physical risk of hard drive failure is identical.
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>I agree with you about the "risk factor". And I realize I can have a folder C:\DRIVED and kind of sort of use it instead of a separate partition. But it is "cleaner" (at least in my mind) to separate the folders and files into separate drives. In my case, I put all applications into C, all projects and support file into D, and customer data into E.