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Nobody wants to setup their hard drive as one giant data dump. Dividing your drive into multiple partitions makes multitasking easier. Keeping different types of data such as work documents, mp3s, video files, etc in a partition separate from the operating system can greatly increase your computer’s performance. And if you are planning on using multiple operating systems then you will absolutely need multiple partitions.

What Is Partitioning ?

A partition can be assumed as a container, like one drawer of a file cabinet. Each partition uses a file system to store and name data. Windows 98 used FAT32 which allowed greater maximum partition sizes and stored data more efficiently than the FAT16 file system of DOS and Windows 95. Windows NT introduced NTFS file system, which offers better data security and efficient memory handling. Windows 2000 and XP can read and write to both NTFS and FAT32 partitions.

Partitioning Your Hard Drive Using FDISK

Follow these simple steps after runnning FDISK command in command prompt to partition your harddrive:

1. First, to view a list of all drives available on your system select (5).
2. Press (4) to view partition information on the drive, then select the new hard drive.
3. Select (1) to create a partition, then on the next screen choose (1) to create a primary partition on that drive.
4. Select (y) if you wish to use all the space on the drive for this one partition(which we don’t want to), or (n) if you wish to make more than one partition on the drive now or later. If you selected (n), enter the amount of space you wish to use for the primary partition.
5. By selecting (n) it means that you do want to create multiple partitions, you must now make a secondary partition using the rest of the free space.
6. Press (1) to create another partition, then (2) to create an extended DOS partition. While it gives you an option to use less than full amount of space on the disk here but any space which is not allocated now can no longer be used by FDISK unless you erase the existing partitions. So accept the default (maximum available) size for the extended partition, then press ‘ESC.’ This will take you to the menu for creating logical drives in the extended partition.
7. To create a logical drive which are represented by drive C: or D: etc, simply fill in the amount of space you require the drive to have.

After you finished performing all this procedure, Exit from FDISK, reboot to windows.

Partitioning Your Hard Drive In Windows 2000/XP

To start partitioning in Windows 2000/Xp environment, right click My Computer and select Manage, once you enter into the Manage screen, from here select Disk Management.

This main screen will show you the existing drives with the new ones. At this instance Windows usually open up a wizard to help partition and format your new drive. If it does not, right click the new drive in the lower pane and select initialize drive.

Now you can partition your drive by following these steps.

1. Right click on the new drive and select new partition, then it will launch the partition wizard.
2. In this step it will then prompt you how much drive space you want to allocate to the new partition.
3. If you choose not to use the full amount of space for the first partition, you can create additional partitions in the same way up to a maximum of four partitions per disk.
4. Now it will ask for a drive letter which Windows will use to represent partition as C: or D: etc.
5. Once you’ve created the partitions, you’ll have to format the newly created partitions which Windows will prompt to do automatically.
6. Once formatting is complete, reboot your computer, and you’re done.

Hibernate Shortcut for WinXP

Hibernate is great because it saves the status of your Windows XP session (all the programs and documents you have open) to the hard drive, so it can automatically restore it the next time you power up.
The first step to making a Hibernate shortcut is to make sure you have Hibernate turned on.

1. Go to the Control panel then click Performance and maintenance.
2. Next, choose Power options, and select the hibernate tab.
3. Finally, make sure Enable hibernation is checked.
4. Now to actually make the shortcut right click your desktop and choose New | Shortcut.
5. Next, type this case-sensitive command into the dialog box rundll32.exe PowrProf.dll, SetSuspendState click next.
6. Give the shortcut a name and click finish.

From now on all you need to do to enter hibernation is double click the shortcut.

Slow Opening Excel 2003 Files in Excel 2007 (Updated)

When opening Microsoft Excel 2003 files in Microsoft Office Excel 2007 without having Excel 2007 already running you may find that files that a long time to open (20-60 seconds) while Excel 2007 or even Microsoft Office Word 2007, PowerPoint 2007 files take only a portion of that time to load.

The solution to this problem is easy and does not require any additional software other than the standard Microsoft Windows Explorer.

1. Open Windows Explorer (explorer.exe)
2. Select Tools | Folder Options from the menu
3. Go to the File Types tab.
   
4. Select list item XLS (Microsoft Office Excel 97-2003 Worksheet) and click on Advanced.
   If the “Appl ication used to perform action:” field the default value should be “C:Program FilesMicrosoft OfficeOffice12EXCEL.EXE” /e” . Change this to “C:Program FilesMicrosoft OfficeOffice12EXCEL.EXE” /e “%1″ . Remember to enclose the full excel.exe path and %1 in parenthesis. Since Windows 95 this is a way to escape spaces in file names; %1 will return the file name of that file that is being opened by double-clicking.You can uncheck “U se DDE” but Microsoft Office Excel 2007 will bring it back to what you see above when you next open it.
   
5. Just confirm (hit “OK” ) on all the Microsoft Windows Explorer dialogs and next time you open a Excel 2003 file in Excel 2007 without having it already running you won’t have to wait!
6. If the above listed steps don’t fix the problem, simply add the Lookup Wizard add-in in Excel. Some readers have reported that solved the problem for them! To install it click the Office Button, Excel Options, Add-Ins, and then click Manage Excel Add-ins | Go on the bottom of the window, select Lookup Wizard and click OK!

How to Make Microsoft Word 2007 Load Faster

Here are some tips that might help you launch Microsoft Word more quickly if it feels slow. Not all will work, and this applies only to Microsoft Word 2007 for Windows. And I’m assuming you’ve already got plenty of RAM and hard disk space, defragement your files regularly and are using a computer fast enough to handle Word 2007.

Remove Unnecessary Add-ins

Click on the Office logo in the top left corner, click on Options at the bottom of the menu, and then Add-Ins towards the bottom of the list in the Word Options window.

Select COM Add-ins at the bottom drop down menu called Manage: and click on the Go… button.

Unselect as many of the Add-Ins in the list and click OK.

Prevent links from being updated

Back in the main Word Options window, click on Advanced.

Scroll down to the bottom and uncheck the Update automatic links at open box.

Click OK.

Change your Default Printer

Some folk have reported faster loading times if they select a different printer. It’s definitely worth trying.

Remove Antivirus Checking

Some users have reported improvement by disabling Norton Antivirus from checking every file when it’s opened. The easiest way to do this, assuming you know what you’re doing, is:

Hit the Window key and then select Run from the Start menu.

Copy the following and paste it into the Run box:

regsvr32 /u “C:\Program Files\Norton Internet Security\Norton AntiVirus\officeav.dll” .

If the Norton feature is installed this should remove it. (It follows that other antivirus products may be doing something similar. The easiest way to find out is to look at the status bar at the bottom of the Microsoft Word window and see if a message like “Scanning file for viruses” or somesuch appears when a file is loading.)

How to Bypass Windows Vista Activation

Since Office XP, Microsoft has been annoying by making you activate your product. Read on to learn how to bypass this ins Windows Vista (any version) yet still have a product ID and have a genuine copy of Vista.

Steps:

1. Install Windows Vista, to install Vista Ultimate off a Home Basic disc, please read:
2. Perform an install of Vista as shown in the article: How to Install Windows Vista Ultimate from a Vista Basic Installation Disk.
3. Download the following hack/patch and scan it yourself for viruses and malware: vistastuff.webng.com/VistaActivator.zip VistaActivator.zip
4. Run the patch in Vista, it may take a few minutes while installing.
5. Reboot.
6. Select Computer -> System Properties and verify that Vista has been activated with a Product ID.
7. Visit www.microsoft.com/genuine and validate Vista to make sure that it is genuine and eligible for updates.

Tips:

• Close all applications before running patch to ensure success.
• Works with Vista x86 (all versions)