Lawrence wrote:
>MY daughter and I each have a fair amount of music and photos stored
>in our respective My Documents folders (in My Music and My Pictures).>>
It's not a good idea to store data on the C-Drive, for the following reasons:
1. If Windows should suddenly get corrupted (It can happen without warning
for any number of reasons, eg viruses, power surges etc), you may have to
reformat your C-Drive and reinstall XP, thus losing all your data stored on
that drive. Data in your D-drive will not be affected.
2. Fragmenting the drive on which the operating system is running will slow
down the whole system, though that's not as much of a problem as it used to
be prior to XP.
3. Your system is probably slowing because you now have insufficient space
for virtual memory to work efficiently---and you may have problems
defragging, as this also needs a fair amount of free space. (10% of the
partition, if memory serves me correctly).
I therefore think your best option by far is to move all the data over into
your D partition, and keep the C partition as clean as you possibly can so
as to keep the operating system as pristine as possible. This also means
NOT storing files on the Desktop ) as this is actually part of Windows
itself. Confine Desktop to shortcuts or temporary files only.
20 GB should be about right for this partition. There are some ( very few)
programs which insist on installing themselves in C because they have to
integrate tightly with XP. Try to keep these to a minimum as far as possible.
It was a bad move by Microsoft not to give an option to place My Documents
on another partition, where that is possible, while installing XP. It
wouldn't have been difficult.
Don Penlington
From the Beach at Surfers Paradise in sunny Queensland.
Computer tutorials, local scenery, and other things at my website:
http://users.tpg.com.au/deepend/index1.html
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