after hearing my professor’s comments about parititioning hard drive, i finally realized what a mistake i made listening to my father to make the c drive a tiny paritition on my old hard drive. originally my father agrued that if i keep the c partition small, the OS doesn’t have to look far to start and shut down so it would increase the performance. it sounded like a valid reason but little did i know about how windows work. whenever you install software on your computer, even if it’s not on the c drive, some files still automatically go into the windows system folder which will make your c drive grow constantly. i gave my c drive 4gb of partition (which was considered ideal by my dad). it soon was consumed leaving me no space to download security updates. i also frequently got low disk space warning. the worst was trying to install apache & mysql on my E drive. that was a total nightmare. my professor said it was totally not worth it partitioning your hard drive at all. there’s no need. he used to do the same thing and only realized he had to waste much time doing book keeping while the performance didn’t really improve dramatically. “windows is the stupidest operating system; so just handle it the most basic way possible. leave everything as defaults otherwise you are just giving yourself trouble” – my professor. after hearing his words, i was suddenly enlightened. i’ve been wanting to install perl on my computer so i can run perl scripts at command line. but i had no space on the C drive and i certainly didn’t want to go through the pain installing it on E drive so i waited until i got my new hard drive.

Last nite we finally reinstalled windows on my new 80gb hard drive. i had to back everything up and reinstall a lot of softwares. i didn’t sleep until 2:30am. but i realize i still didn’t back up everything. the back up cd for the games is corrupted and i needed my bookmarks. so today we hooked the old hard drive as a slave and got the files directly from it. it’s finally done. i feel so good. i immediately installed phpdev and it worked like a charm. when i tried to install it on my E drive, it took me many days and with lots of help from other people and it still didn’t function perfectly. you don’t want to do it XP. after what i’ve gone through, i strongly oppose partitioning.