Partitioning a Hard Drive? Improve Performance or Waste of Time?

Mutz

Hey Guys, just a quick question?

I have a 3 year old laptop and its starting to slow down.
P4 2.4GHZ with 512mb Ram. (Ordered 1gb ram to upgrade)

I have it partitioned this way:

Drive C: 20Gb - OS - Using Windows XP Home
Drive 20GB - Photos and music.

I'm going to re-format the C: drive to have a clean start again but what i want to know is, Does partitioning actually improve the performance of my laptop or would i see the same performance if i just left the C: drive at 40GB?

Cheers

newbie2

I don't think it'll improve performance. I have 4 parttions on my c drive and 2 partitions on my new maxtor 300g drive. No improvement in performance was noticed, however i could be wrong.

aidan_walsh

It won't effect the actual perfomance of the OS, but it will protect your files should you ever have to reinstall Windows. By having them all on a seprate partition, they won't be deleted during the reinstallation process.

The best way to make sure your laptop is running as fast as it can is to keep only the most important and useful processes running in the background, stop anything else. This will save processor time and RAM.

SeanW

Shouldn't be any big performance boost per-se, but it is a conveneint and foolproof way to organise data.