In response to the second part of your question, partitioning may not be necessary at all for you.
A partition is essentially a "shell," a portion of your hard drive that is reserved for a specific purpose, generally what is called a logical partition.
A logical partition acts as if it's a separate hard drive installed on your system and is designated with a different drive letter (ie, if your hard drive is the C: drive, a second partitioned logical drive would be D:). This is helpful if you like to separate the areas that your programs are installed and where files are saved, but if you don't save a lot of documents and need to separate your files into different categories, I wouldn't worry about.
Of course, there's also striped and dynamic drives, but we won't get into that.
If you're a battery, you're either working or you're dead....
Coppermine wrote:In response to the second part of your question, partitioning may not be necessary at all for you.
A partition is essentially a "shell," a portion of your hard drive that is reserved for a specific purpose, generally what is called a logical partition.
A logical partition acts as if it's a separate hard drive installed on your system and is designated with a different drive letter (ie, if your hard drive is the C: drive, a second partitioned logical drive would be D:). This is helpful if you like to separate the areas that your programs are installed and where files are saved, but if you don't save a lot of documents and need to separate your files into different categories, I wouldn't worry about.
Of course, there's also striped and dynamic drives, but we won't get into that.
Coppermine wrote:As far as clearing up "space" on your hard drive is concerned, when you empty your recycle bin, those files are removed from the digital space (KB, MB, GB, etc) on the drive and essentially frees it up.
What Amazins was talking about earlier, just to simplify, is that files are always "recoverable" after being deleted from the hard drive just because of the way Windows manages it's file structure. There are, of course, Windows registry entries and unregistered .dll's that will inevitably remain and as mentioned earlier, only a "file shredding" utility can permanently delete them.
For all intents and purposes though, you can safely assume that once files are emptied from the Recycle Bin, they are effectively gone from your hard drive and no longer taking up space, using resources etc.
I have nothing to hide as far as the FBI but I do use a disk eraser when I sell or throw away a HDD. That's the only time.
Maine has a good swing for a pitcher but on anything that moves, he has no chance. And if it's a fastball, it has to be up in the zone. Basically, the pitcher has to hit his bat. - Mike Pelfrey
Technically the data doesn't stay on the HD indefinitely. Windows just marks it as "free" and then eventually it's overwritten by another program, but there's no way to predict when or what portion of the file is written over, that's why you need to defragment your HD every now and then. Just thought I'd join in the geekdom.
I run regular AV and spyware scans. I also make sure to defrag and do disk cleanup. 1 thing that I also do is make sure to run registry scans. It is simple to do and has gotten me out of a lot of jams.
Lofunzo wrote:I run regular AV and spyware scans. I also make sure to defrag and do disk cleanup. 1 thing that I also do is make sure to run registry scans. It is simple to do and has gotten me out of a lot of jams.
Lofunzo wrote:I run regular AV and spyware scans. I also make sure to defrag and do disk cleanup. 1 thing that I also do is make sure to run registry scans. It is simple to do and has gotten me out of a lot of jams.
how do you run those registry scans
I am not sure whether my version is still valid but I got Reg Mechanic for free and I run it often. It cleans up the bad keys left by normal use and spyware. Do you have a file sharing proggy that you use?? If so, you should be able to find it there. If not, I can probably get it in a day or so.
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by Coppermine » Fri Oct 21, 2005 10:40 pm 
