New guy and rookie computer operator needs hard drive and partitioning help

[greengillbill]

Hey folks,

I am new to this site, and have a question. First of all, let me see if I understand this correctly. 1. Partitioning is like separate rooms in a house. You then assign each room a designation, is this right? Some people like to partition and some do not.

The question: I have an HP pavilion 305w. 256 ram, 40gb hd. Runs pretty good, but running out of space. At the advise of a friend, I bought a wd caviar SE 80 GB hd, 7200 rpm. I also purchased 2-512 MB ram.

I am to the point where I need to set up the new drive. What would be a straight forward setup? So far from reading the past threads, I understand that my drive c would have the OS (windows xp) and all the programs. Then my new hd would contain all the documents (music, video clips, email junk, and business stuff.) I was thinking, after reading most of the forums, of creating 2 partitions. One for documents and one for business. Does this seem like a good idea, or should I create 3 partitions. One for music, one for video and one for business. I apologize for the question, but I am not familiar to this part of computing.

I also was wondering If I should move the new hd as the master and use the old hd as the slave. What ever is most practical and straightforward is best for me.
Thanks in advancefor the help

Bill

[glc]

With only 80gb, it's not worth partitioning. Keep it simple. Keep things the way they are, add the new drive, and move "My Documents" over to it. This can be done with a few mouse clicks and all your software will still know where it is.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310147

[bucksfanjimj1]

There are lots of ways to do it. You should ask yourself what is the most practical and easiest for you. If the 40 gb drive is ok, I would use the 80 as storage. You could make 2 partitions on the 80. One for personal use and one for business.

[greengillbill]

Thanks a million for the advice. This was the way I was leaning towards. Just wanted to test what I thought against more knowledgeable users.

I am sort of stuck in the old age of computing. I was just looking at new computers in a local ad and noticed they had at least triple the hd I have, and way more ram as well.

[not important]

I like partitioning. I usually do about 25GB for my OS (XP), 50GB for files and downloads and the rest for movie storage and backup images.