my turn for help please

[Rick Nebiolo]

Ray,

Get two internal hard drives and use a partitioning scheme to isolate operating system and programs from data as much as possible.

My first HD is partitioned as follows:

C: WinXP and Programs (30 GB)
D: Data (except music) (75 GB)
E: Spare (10 GB) (now using for PT databases)

Second HD:

F: Page File (2 GB) (some geeks think this speeds things up, not sure myself)
G: Music (95 GB)
H: Ghost Image: 16 GB (I use Norton Ghost to make a perfect, restorable image of my C: drive. Ghost works from a floppy, so if I had a HD failure I can get back to EXACTLY where I was.)
I: Downloads (1.2 GB) (this is overkill).

I use two external drives to back up music and data. One is just an old drive in a special converter case.

If you don't have that much data you can use your second internal drive for a data backup partition and for your Ghost partition.

I like Radified's advice and guides for creating partitions and maintaining a stable computer and using Norton Ghost.

Good luck with your new machine.

~ Rick