The Advantages Of Partitioning

It is a mystery to me why IT people that knew for decades so many things everyday people struggle with in computing don't care a thing and don't teach us nothing.

There are hundreds of millions of PCs in this world that run inefficiently because of minor software settings that can be easily remedied with a few administrative measures that can be even included in the installation kit, and more or less transparent to user.

I just read in a major IT publication that one of the reviewers in there had installed the second operating system on a portable, and having a menu produced at start-up, saying which one to choose. There was even a screen-shot with the menu at start-up.

But he used a feature i'm not aware of yet, a virtual hard drive. Probably a different way of the same old partitioning concept. Probably a huge contiguous file on your hard drive that can be used as a different hard drive.

Windows 7 and XP have the option to partition a hard drive at installation, as an advanced option, as i remember since i installed them last time.

But at installation, which usually comes at the most unexpected time, you don't have time to mess around with learning partitioning and complicate your life by taking new risks.

But let's describe it a little bit. Instead of seeing the computer with one hard drive, you can see it with many. It is the same hard drive, the same space, but physically divided into several contiguous areas that you can see as many smaller hard drives.

So you install the operating system on one of them then you can put in your data like photographs, music and games like before or you can put your personal stuff in other partitions.

There are several advantages of doing this. First all of the operating system and programs are confined to one physical area and they do not mix with data, if you choose to put it on o different drive letter. You can limit the OS (Windows) partition to a predetermined size so you know when things are going out of control and installed too many programs on your computer and need to get rid of the unused ones.

All the programs being together close to one another, the average access time compared to the physical average access time for the whole drive is multiplied for those by the ratio between the size of the whole drive and the size of OS partition. Another reason to keep it small.

There is less fragmentation for the programs you install since you didn't mess that partition by adding and deleting tens of thousands of files like the modern age home computing requires. This adds to the performance of the computer.

But one of the unseen until more recently advantage of keeping you data separate from your OS is ease of upgrading and reinstalling the operating system, like the gentleman mentioned above did.

They where trying for decades to advertise the newer operating systems as being possible upgrades for the old one already on your computer, not only because of the new features but with the designer's intent for the user to be able to keep his data while installing the new version in top of the old one.

That never worked too smoothly for several reasons, and people too often ended up reinstalling and loosing some data and more important, time. And more important, the hard drive was more clogged with files and more fragmented than if you just clean installed the new version on a newly formatted hard drive.

So if you have multiple partitions, you cam simply install the new version of the OS or even a totally different OS on a free partition that you can leave it there after the initial partitioning for this purpose only. You can even have like XP, 7 and Linux on you computer in the same time!

You will have a menu at start-up with which one to boot and you will transition smoothly, by sharing the data from data partitions between different OS, with no risk of data loss, having time to learn new features, less stress, only advantages.

Major OS producers should have worked on having a default partitioning scheme for different hard drive sizes that can be readily used by the average person as a regular option as opposed to an advanced one that can be furtherly tailored by the advanced user, and all i described above could happen smoothly, with no one needing to know all these things.

For people who got enough of the loosing data and time and administering their computer, here came the option of storing personal data in the cloud. It doesn't matter where you are, what computer/device you use and how broken the software you use on it is, since your data is safe in the cloud.

Only thing is it's not with you anymore. For people who are not comfortable with their personal stuff being on unknown servers, there is the option of partitioning, only if software producers made it easy for us.