My 2 cents worth is some advice from a series of Keyboard Magazine articles on keeping your music computer maintained.

The suggestion was to partition the hard drives into smaller separate drives. I couldn't do this on the XP as it came already formatted with one drive only. When I got the laptop a couple of years ago I decided to give it a go, and I haven't looked back.

The laptop came with 250GB (pathetic isn't it!) It was divided into the main OS drive and a Data drive. I kept the main C drive for the OS and my programme files with shortcuts to them on the desktop.

The data drive I partitioned into separate drives for my saved my music files. There's one for Sibelius, one for WAV files and so on. I needed more storage earlier this year so I bought an external 500GB drive and have partitioned that as well.

The external drive has all my PG programmes, audio files and libraries on it. If the laptop goes up in smoke I at least have the really important stuff on the external drive.

It makes defragmenting easier and quicker as the whole computer doesn't have to be done all the time.

The last thing I'll add is if you go this way, allow a lot more on each partition than you think you'll need. It sure fills up fast!

Anyway that's my take on it. I'm sure there will be lots of other great ideas.

Got to go, students here very soon. Best of luck.

yjoh

[i]Music...a joy for life.