Even back in the DOS days of limited hard drive space, this was still important. My approach is like Eddie and Pat's to use folders. Lots of them. There is no limit to the number of folders you can have under a folder (well, alright, I think it might still be 128 max under a top level folder, but that's plenty).

Everything in its place.

This makes backing up easier, too. Then take a copy off-site.

I greatly prefer this to loads of small partitions.

And about putting lots of stuff on the desktop - this used to have quite a negative effect on start-up time. Not much anymore.

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