Got a new dell laptop? Going to reinstall windows? Use this. - Page 2

I'd leave the diagnostic partition but take out the partition that has all the drivers and software. installing from scratch isn't THAT hard. Besides, if I were the type of dufus who really needed those drivers how in Hades would I ever be able get to the hidden partition in the first place??

I'm figuring on DLing the Diagnostic utility... might as well use the CD for what it's worth. (This is actually my form of an excuse for deleting that partition... )

In what order is it best to install programs? Should I install largest programs first?

If you have deleted that partition, don't bother downloading utilities. Fix your comp only when there's problem or call dell for warranty instead

There's no best order to install programs, just keep one partition for windows (I personally use 10 GB), another partition for applications, and a few other partition for other stuffs.

Install all application in the application partition. This approach will help you organize the comp & fast disk access also

Mmm, long ways for me to learn yet. I lumped my Windows and drivers/apps together. But if there's no good way to install applications, is it all right to install the largest two I have (Pro/Engineer, about 1 gig; and MS Office, a few hundred meg) last?

The installation order isn't important. You shouldn't care much about it .

If you reinstalled windows, most of your application won't work

The reason to have a separate partitions for applications,download, music, and windows is for disk management. With this approach, you will always keep the windows partition optimize & you can be sure that the windows have enough disk space for temp & caching. 2nd reason is that you will have less fragmentations on the windows drive, compare to the other aproach

You don't need utility to delete hidden partition. Go to control panel->administratrion-> disk management and delete the partition there if you wish.

Get Ghost (or you fav drive imaging s/w) and make a copy of the HD before you do anything to it. This way you can restore it to the factory image in the future (like when/if you need to sell it).

Outpost.com has Partition Magic/Ghost (Windows XP version) for $19.99 after rebates

http://shop2.outpost.com/product/420...H:MAIN_RSLT_PG

This is a steal. If you're worried about rebates, I bought Norton Internet Security (free after 2 rebates) the week of 12/22 and received 2 different rebates last week. The week after that I bought Norton Systemworks (free after 2 rebates) and received 2 rebate checks yesterday.

Also you will notice that one of the $20 rebates is for an "upgrade rebate." I didn't think I would qualify since I have not really bought Ghost yet. If you read the form, though

http://a248.e.akamai.net/f/248/5462/..._upg_ecomm.pdf

You'll notice that ANY symantec product qualifies Ghost for a rebate - with the title page or disk 1. This means you needn't have bought a copy of Ghost previously - just ANY Norton product.

Take Testinz advice and just use the built-in windows tools to remove the unwanted partitions. If you're re-installing, as mentioned, windows should notice the partitions. Just be sure to pay attention while installing.

I would agree that partitioning does not have the same meaning that it used to, but it is not useless. A 80 GB harddrive should be partitioned at least into 2. Not only does this make it faster when you want to defragment just that partition/logical drive, but also gives you a secondary partition where you can keep your important documents on, and install those huge games onto.

I always point the "My Documents" folder link to the secondary partition. Whenever I re-install XP, I just re-link it to the second partition. This way you can re-do your C: drive as often as you want.

Not that it is necessary. These days with XP I don't find myself re-installing unless I get a new motherboard/cpu combo. With a laptop, that is rather unlikely.

80 GB should be 20gb/60gb.. or 20/30/30. If you do lots of downloading (newsgroups anyone?), you will be unraring and deleting stuff on one of the partitions all the time! You'll want to defrag it often so you may want to not have any games or apps installed onto it.

I am getting the 60GB version myself, and most likely will do a simple 20/40 or 20/20/20.

thanks for the tip about the lost 3.5 gig!

dban wipes your data not only the partitions as I understand it. It is useful if you're returning a hard drive or selling it on ebay and don't want people to access your old data.

Does the partition that contains the drivers also contain an image of XP as well - so as to facilty a complete refresh of your laptop if desired?

Hmm.. that would be interesting but it probably does not as that partition is typically 40GB and the xp disk is much larger. But it would be possible to do it yourself. You can create an iso file from the windows xp disk and somehow ( ) put it on a separate partition in order to boot from it.