Partitioning - is it worth it?

[nfl2k2]

at pcworld, they talk about partioning your computer. for those of you who have done this before, does it make computers easier to get around on? I've got Windows 2000 and use my PC mainly for games, svcd encoding (CCE), watching dvd's, and internet.

[Greg12]

Not really unless you have mutliple Operating systems.

[homerpez]

It used to be the case (I think with FAT partitions) that using more partitions allowed you to use more physical space on the drive, and when you only used one partition it somehow ignored some of the space...

I think newer file systems (NTFS, FAT32 maybe) are able to be partitined using more of the actual space available... I wouldn't worry about it, unless you plan on running 2 or more operating systems, like Greg said...

[d4n13l]

Comes in handy if you want to format the main drive (C:/). It allows you to place all the files you want to keep on another drive (which would be D:/ if you had another partition), whilst you format and reinstall windows.
It is also handy if you want to keep a system backup - I install widows, drivers and some software, then I use Norton Ghost to back what I have just installed, to a small, secondary partition (about 1GB). So if windows dies for some reason or another, I can use the backup on D:/ to give myself a nice "new" Windows install; just what it was like after I installed it.

[mrtristan]

If you only have one hard drive, then it might be wise to do so. Like Daniel, I partioned my primary hard drive. A 6 gig partition holds my Windows OS and I use the other for files. Unless my physical hard drive crashes, it's easy for me to reinstall Windows.

I usually do a clean OS install once a year or sooner, depending on how buggy I feel that my system has become. Since I switched to w2k, I think I'll be doing clean installs less often.

An added benefit of partitioning comes when you want to defragment your Windows drive. It's a lot faster to do so on a drive that contains only your system files.