Please help me with partitions

1. No, what increases drive performance is more spindles. The explaination given to you was incorrect. Even though your brain see's a "logical" seperation, all 3 of those partitions are sharing the same physical hardware for read/writes.

2. Did you just build? It's easier to rebuild.

3. You will have to uninstall and reinstall... yay registry.

4. I recommend rebuilding anyway but you "should" be able to extend C.

The multi-partition thing will NOT improve your HDD performance, except in rare cases. Sure, if you want to find a file named "XZY.exe" lost somewhere on a known drive (let's say, you know you put it on the D: drive), searching through the directory of a smaller "drive" might be slightly faster than on a larger drive. But the difference is small, and you probably don't do this often.

The reasoning I can buy for separate partitions is this: establish one Primary Partition on which you install all your OS. Then create a second data-only Partition as Drive D:, let's say. Then, on EVERY application install, do NOT install to your C: drive - put it on your D: drive. Also ensure that Windows puts My Documents on your D: drive, and that all your apps use places on the D: drive as their default storage place. This does not use up huge space on the C: "drive" (Primary Partition), so it can be a modest size because it only holds the OS and some of its "Hangers-on". But most importantly, if you ever have trouble with the OS that requires you to re-Format the boot drive (C and re-install Windows, all that work can be done on the C: drive only, while all your applications with configurations and their data files are untouched on the D: drive.

In your case, your might want to consider deleting all your installed apps from the C: drive, re-arranging your two other partitions into one called D:, and then re-installing them this way. That avoids a complete re-install of everything, but that may not really be the way you choose to go.

Back to your other problem. Windows will allow you to shrink or expand a Partition with Unallocated Space on the same drive, and the tools are in Disk Manager, as you have found. But it will NOT let you do this on the BOOT PARTITION! There are some third-party tools that will do that for you, though. I understand Gparted will. I also understand many people have used Partition Magic for this and it does very well, BUT I have read it does not work in VISTA - for that, you need another product from the same company. So with one of those tools you could do what you want. Or, as you've said, start over from the beginning by wiping everything from your HHD and re-partitioning to ONE large volume, then re-install all.

Check out leon2006's post in this thread:

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/ [...] ated-vista

He names the software he says does the job - appears to be a different product.

Not sure this will help anybody, but this is how I think about it.

A hard drive is like a record player. They both 'play' from outside to inside. The slowest thing for a drive to do is 'pick up the needle and put it toward the inner part of the record'. Which corresponds to a drive reading a file on the innermost partitions of the drive (which would be the partition created last).

A computer never has to look for a file. It knows exactly where it is, it's just a matter of how long it will take to get the head to where it needs to be (and then wait for the data to spin under it.) Now if all your most used programs (OS, games...) are written to the outermost partition (the first one created) the drive won't have to spend much time moving the head out of the first few 'tracks'.

Until you want to back something up by copying to the last partition, which actually might go a little slower, because the drive head is going to have to ferry data to and from the extreme edges of the drive. Fair tradeoff.

There is also the matter that data spins under the head faster in the outer portions of the drive than in the inner portions. Simply due to the fact that the whole drive must spin at the same rate, but the outer edge has farther to go so it spins faster. They might spread out the 0s and 1s to compensate for that though. Hmm. (So that means to make a copy of a phonograph by visually analyzing the groove you would have to take the faster outer speed into account by gradually elongating the wave?) Which makes the first partition even a little better for those often used files.