Just bought one

  • Thread starter Thread starter Ben Stevenson
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Ben Stevenson

Hi

My old computer (WinME, AMD 450Mhz, 13.5Gb HDD)blew up. The power supply
burnt and so did the motherboard to a small extent. Went out and bought a
new computer, 2.4Ghz, 40Gb HDD, XP preloaded. They don't give XP disk. I am
totally new to XP and would appreciate advise.

On my old computer I had 4 partitions. C drive for me, D drive for data, E
drive for Internet and F drive for my son and daughter's schoolwork. Would
it be advisable to still have 4 partitions, and if yes, how much space
should I allocate to each partition. especially to C drive.

My son wants to play his computer games which was distastrous for ME, so he
played on a spare computer not connected to the Internet. Would it be OK to
play on this new computer on XP? These games are on discs and not on the
Internet.
TIA
 
Rather than have so many partitions, why not use the concept of
"permissions" to give each of your user their own space? This will be
sufficient segregation, i would think.

Read in "help" about System Admininstration.

Basically, create ID's for each. Each person's "My Documents" will be
in their own space and won't interfere with each other.

This way you have one partition and don't have to worry about sizing it
right nor wasting space by sizing it wrong.

Re the games ... you may find some games, esp. the older ones, weren't
developed with XP's security model in mind and and you may find they
don't work well.
Hope this is useful to you. Let us know.

rms
 
If he's using XP Home Edition as opposed to Pro, this can be quite unwieldy
and most inconvenient as every time he changes permissions in Home Edition
he'd have to go into Safe Mode.
 
Instead of using various partitions why not simply use accounts. You could have yours as the administrator and the others as limited accounts. They could all have their own passwords which would give a small portion of privacy as only the most advanced users would be able to bypass the passwords screen and access the accounts. As the administrator you alone would have the option of adding programs and or software and so each limited user would need you to install things for them giving you added security over the system. You could then control what programs are in each users startup\program folder and only you could make security changes. Good luck. {:~)
 
Ben Stevenson said:
My old computer (WinME, AMD 450Mhz, 13.5Gb HDD)blew up. The power supply
burnt and so did the motherboard to a small extent. Went out and bought a
new computer, 2.4Ghz, 40Gb HDD, XP preloaded. They don't give XP disk. I am
totally new to XP and would appreciate advise. ----
On my old computer I had 4 partitions. C drive for me, D drive for data, E
drive for Internet and F drive for my son and daughter's schoolwork. Would
it be advisable to still have 4 partitions, and if yes, how much space
should I allocate to each partition. especially to C drive. ----
My son wants to play his computer games which was distastrous for ME, so he
played on a spare computer not connected to the Internet. Would it be OK to
play on this new computer on XP? These games are on discs and not on the
Internet. >TIA
Click to expand...

I hope you got a real good discount. If you bought a new machine but
they didn't give you any CDs with it that have XP on one of them
(along with other stuff you might need for that particular computer),
you got took. To buy an XP upgrade disk is like $99, and more for a
stand-alone copy.

This info is for anyone contemplating buying a new system, and not to
"rub it in":
You could have gotten an eMachines Celeron 2.7 gigahertz (GHz), which
equals 2700 MHz, with a 17 inch flat-screen monitor (not flat monitor,
but flat face for better resolution), a color jet printer, a 40 GB
hard drive, 256 MBs RAM, a DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive, and Windows XP
installed & with the recovery CDs, all for a whopping:
!! $340 !!
(after rebates - you pay $300 more up front). And for $80 more you
can have an 80 gig hard drive & 512 MBs RAM (I very strongly
recommend having at least 512 MBs RAM, especially for games - 256 is
very minimal). They also kick up the processor to a 2.8 MHz (from the
2.7 - whoopeee).

Some people will tell you a Celeron is a crippled P4. Maybe it
suffers for some super high-end applications. But for everything
I've seen it run, I see great performance. I bought my son this same
package deal two months ago, & it runs great. And I own an eMachines
3200+ Athalon. 7 days a week 6am to 12pm voice tech s7upport. 1 year
warrantee. (I bought an eMachines 2 year extended warrantee on top of
the one year for the Athalon). These are great systems for the lower
price they charge. I also have gotten all of the rebates back (5 of
them). Years ago eMachines reputation may have suffered, but they've
come a long way. And Gateway & eMachines have now merged.

This sale of $340 is good from tomorrow Sunday 6/6/04 to 6/12/04 at
"Best Buy." (Sunday newspaper adds). Also the same set-up for $387
at "Office Depot".
-----------
As far as partitioning the C: drive - 40 gigabytes is a small drive
nowadays with an XP system. Just leave the C: drive alone. Better to
have separate accounts on the computer with separate passwords for
each user. But you'll have to ask someone else how to do this, as I
am the only user of my computer and have never set up separate
accounts. Also, when you install stuff on the computer, I believe you
can save it as "public for everyone to access" or "only this
particular user can access it".

Big Mac
 
Thanks for your advise.
Internet downloads do disturb the OS quite a bit, so I was told to have it
on a separate drive - drive E (in WinME).

All that data we accumulate should not be able to interfere in other things,
hence I was told to keep it on a separate drive D.

I was told to keep drive C separate from all others.

If I understand you correctly you say that all can be in one drive (drive
C)and it would be OK?
TIA
 
Didn't quite understand what you mean. As I said I'm very new to XP. Could
you explain a bit please.
Thanks
 
XP Professional has a number of options for setting permissions on file
access, all of which can be done at system level. That is, from within the
operating system by right clicking a file in Windows Explorer and selecting
the security option. This requires Simple File Sharing first be turned off.

Simple File Sharing is hard wired into XP Home Edition and can only be
turned off from Safe Mode as in, you must exit Windows, reboot the system
and go to Safe Mode. Since it is hard wired into XP Home Edition, you would
need to do that every time you wanted to make some such change with regard
to access. Second, XP Pro has a feature called the Group Policy Editor that
offers additional benefits and usage in this regard. This feature doesn't
exist in XP Home Edition nor can it be added to it. It's also a bit
complicated and as a "newbie" you'd probably want to avoid it anyway.:-)

From what you originally posted, it seems you want a simple way of
organizing your setup with everything in its own place and it sounds as
though, using specific partitions would be much easier for you than setting
up separate user IDs and having to hassle with file ownership and other
security issues with which you would be faced setting up separate users,
especially given that you are new. Having separate users will certainly do
that but if security isn't an issue for you and this is the way you are used
to working, it would seem using separate partitions for your children as
you've specified would be much easier.

I can't say what size partitions would be best for you but if I were setting
up as you are, assuming applications will be installed on the C drive, I'd
divide the hard drive in to fourths, allowing 10GB for each partition. If
your children's needs are much smaller, you might make their partition
smaller accordingly and adjust the other partitions to your needs in terms
of how much storage is necessary on those drives. With regard to the C
drive, you need enough space for the operating system, applications, the
pagefile (called the swapfile on Windows 9x) and whatever storage you may
require for yourself on that drive. NOTE: there's no fundamental advantage
to placing your apps on a separate drive at least insofar as protecting
against a system crash. If the necessity presented itself for having to
format and reinstall Windows (Even though the manufacturer didn't give you a
disk, they had to have given you some means of recovery, likely a hidden
partition, in which case the C drive would be wiped when you start over) you
would have to reinstall the applications regardless on what partition they
were installed.

That said, if you wish to save yourself a lot of grief later, you'd be well
advised to see if you can get an XP CD from your PC manufacturer or purchase
it at retail. Reason being, it has tools for various repair options.
Whatever recovery routine the manufacturer has given you likely doesn't
include a repair option and it can save you a lot of effort. While no
guarantee it will resolve issues you might have later on, it is one more
line of defense and another option you can try before moving to more drastic
measures. Also, always be sure you are well backed up.

Good luck.
 
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