Partitioning my laptop

I suggest not to partition a 120 GB HDD. Seriously, it's not that "badass" and while working with large files, you'll soon find smaller partitions to be an unnecessary restraint.

Also, you don't really need to format very often. If you feel it's time for a fresh XP install, you can do that just fine without formating your primary HDD. Alternatively, get an external HDD for backup and archival purposes if you feel the urge to format your internal HDD every now and then (which is totally pointless, though).

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by russ

Also, just because he doesn't necessarily need to format very often, in theory and a perfect world, in practice, sometimes it is necessary to start clean every once in a while.

You can do a clean install without formatting a system partition. For XP, just be sure to delete the \WINDOWS and \PROGRAM FILES folders. Anything else remains untouched anyways, so formatting is absolutely unnecessary. You can easily back up your Documents and Settings folder by simply renaming it, for example.

Originally Posted by LiquidAcid

This reduces the defrag process mostly to the first drive. And you also think a lot more about organizing your data (I know some people, owning a >250gig drive, only one partition - content is like absolute chaos, you find nothing, absolutely nothing...)

Defragmenting your HDD is overrated, anyway. At least with an NTFS file system and a fairly recent drive model, you won't experience any noticable slowdown due to a fragmented disk. Defragmenting once every three or four months is more than enough, even if you have a large > 250 GB partition/disk.

I also doubt the positive effect of small partitions. It's entirely subjective, but I like to have my data organized in one partition on a single drive (I'm even using a 320 GB one at the moment). Organization is a moot argument, because you can use folders to achieve the same effect while not having to worry about partition space.

There's nowhere I can't reach.