Ok folks...we got the Operating system and overclocking issue taken care of. .....thanks to all who responded.
hopefully my last question... for a while
It is still necessary to partition your hard drive even using Windows XP... i have an 80gig Western digital... i was going to partition it into two 40 gigs.... or is that still necessary?


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I like 1 large partition as drive letters really 'p' me off. With FAT32 it isn't a good idea to go above 32GB, in fact anything over 8GB gets pretty wasteful with the cluster size. NTFS does away with this but obviously you need Win2000/XP to access NTFS, if planning to dual boot be sure the first partition is FAT32. IIRC cluster size for FAT32 on a 32GB partn is 32K, 32.1GB+ is 64K and far less compatible (eg WinXP won't install). The cluster size is the minimum space reserved for any file, a set of clusters will be used for bigger files but again you are stuck to a full cluster even if only part of it is needed. Basically this means on average you waste half of your cluster size for EVERY file on your HD, that's completely wasted space, if you have many small files (text etc) it gets worse while a partn with mostly huge files (AVI) will waste less space. Put simply NTFS uses a 4K cluster size whether you use 10GB or 100GB so you only waste 2K per file rather than FAT32's 32K per file, and FAT32 hates partns bigger than 64GB too. In Win Explorer select the root of your drive and then select all, r.click -> Properties tells you the number of files you have, then multiply it by your cluster size for a pretty accurate wastage.