[John Steven]

Partitioning hard discs is cheap insurance against something going awry.

My personal preference is to have the Operating system and software on a partition by itself, photos on another partition,video files on another, and all downloads and patches on yet another.

By doing it this way, I am able to make a recovery image (Acronis True Image) on removable media (DVD) of just my OS and Software installations after a clean install, (I need not tell you what a pain a complete re-install is) should my hard drive fail.

I never download e mail from any provider on my machines either, so there is never a chance of losing any important e mails should I encounter a hard drive failure.

I make periodic copies to DVD of the other partitions in the event of failure also.

I recently had a hard drive fail, and using my Acronis recovery DVD I was up-n-running again in just under 20 minutes after partitioning the drive (the only thing that needed updating was my anti-virus)