By Wade Herman, Tampa PC Users Group
wherman1@tampabay.rr.com

A little background:

My daughter’s Christmas wish list included the wish that Santa would help her upgrade her old Pentium II 233MHZ Cow computer (never can remember that company’s name). Since Santa’s computer was almost as old, he felt could justify an upgrade also.

I began doing some research for the best deal on a new case, motherboard and memory. The object was to get the best components at a good price. Just can’t understand buying cheap components cheap. Nowhere is the price difference between Chevrolet and Cadillac quality less than in the world of computers. Unfortunately, there are lots of choices, and products are upgraded at blinding speed so you must do your homework or deal with someone you trust. After spending hours online and visiting several local emporiums it occurred to me that I had ignored sources within our own users group. These members apparently do not feel comfortable talking up their business to our members so I will do it for them. Everyone I talked to had very good experiences with them. Problems are always a possibility, but we have very knowledgeable people with a personal interest. However, unless you have some technical expertise this is not the route for you. You cannot expect them to hold your hand through every step. Should you run into some problem beyond the answer of a question, what you will pay for help will be less than at other sources and they are interested. Yes, I had a few minor problems. They were solved quickly, by the Head Honcho, not some tech support person typing your question into a computer!

I settled on an AMD 1900XP processor and Motherboard, 512MB DDR Ram, with 80GB 7200RPM drive. In a spiffy case with 4 full size bays and 2 floppy bays.

I made an image of my old 20GB onto the new 80GB drive, using Norton Ghost, so I avoided having to reinstall my software on the new drive. Pretty Cool!

The little metal box that stores the information is called the Physical Hard Disk Drive. It may be thought of as a big storage box in which you place folders in some order defining programs and inside the folders you place files which contain the information to execute a program or store data. The greater the storage capacity of the drive the more difficult it is to keep your data logically organized and easily accessible. From an organization standpoint it is much easier to efficiently organize data if you have multiple smaller storage boxes or filing cabinets assigned to different categories of information. This is what partitioning allows. You may have just one Physical Drive but now you can divide up (Partition) areas of that drive to look to the computer like you have a number of smaller independent drives. When creating these Logical Drives (Partitions) you can assign them different sizes depending on the amount of data you will be storing. Using Partition Magic you can change the size of a partition without losing data stored in the partition. The primary or boot partition is automatically called C: and is the drive the computer uses to load the operating system (Windows) at startup. Here I install Windows related programs and name the drive “Windows”. I make the next partition, Logical Drive (D:) and name it “Programs”. Here I store most of the programs I use. The next partition, Logical Drive (E:) I might call “Data”. Here I would store data files for letters, spreadsheets, databases. Logical Drive (F:) might be called “Games”. Logical Drive (G:) might be called “Music” and so on.

This makes it easy and quick to back up your data files that change often. Just tell your back up program to back up that Logical Drive. No need to back up your Windows or Program files if you have not added something new.

If files on a drive change often, these are the ones that need to be defragmented, and the smaller the drive the quicker this operation takes place.

Files will load faster as the disk will not have to search over the entire Physical Drive for program fragments.

If you do a file search and know that the file resides in the Logical Drive you have set aside for “Data”, the search time may be much shorter as the computer will not have to search the entire Physical Drive.

Reduce disk space waste. Many people do not realize that the space used on a disk is always more than the actual file size. On drives more than 32GB, storage space is allocated in multiples of 32KB. If the file is only 1KB in size it will use 32KB of drive space, wasting 31KB of disk storage space. If the file is 33KB, it will occupy 64KB. If the Logical Drive is made between 8-16GB, then the 1KB file will occupy only 8KB of disk space, wasting only 7KB of disk space instead of 31KB.

There is now a separate FAT (File Allocation Table) for each Logical Drive so if one becomes corrupted, a fairly common defect, the other Logical Drives will probably still be accessible. Additional bootable drives can be created to allow multiple operating systems on the same machine.

If the above has tweaked your interest in partitioning your hard drive, then read my review of Partition Magic 7.0 in this newsletter. u