XPS M1530 -What is the need to repartition?

I have seen many people mention that they repartition their laptop (mainly with VISTA) as soon as they receive it. What is the idea behind this? Is it really important in terms of increasing laptop performance or such? Or is it just to save some more space? In that case is it not ok to work with whatever partition is there, and just save our files in the different partitions?

PS., I am not an expert in these issues, hence the queries. Sorry if they are lame or dumb!

Thanks in advance.

 

Are you talking about reformatting? if so people do it to remove the crapware that comes with their laptops.

 

When I first received my laptop it had a performance scale (dell's rating i think) of 5.0. I cleaned it up and killed some services and it jumped up to 5.1. did a fresh install and now it is 5.1. Actually every catagory is up around 5.5 which is .5 up but my memory is keep it low. so i guess it is better but i am not sure how much better .5 actually is in real world

 

Many reasons.

- Get space back by removing MediaDirect and restore partition.
- Get more performance by clearing the bloatware installed.
- Need to repartition if you want to multi boot.
- May want to use another partition to store your data in case anything happens to OS partition.

 

I'm also confused by this.

Is there anything wrong with just having one big sector(if that's the right word)?

I think people mainly partition so they can reinstall the OS without losing their files but I'm not sure.

 

when i receive my 1530 i'll create another partition for my data.

any idea how to do this in 1530? or do i need to reformat it and create partition during reformating?

do the CD supply by Dell came up with partitioning options?

thanks and sorry for hijacking the thread.

 

True, but again that's not strictly necessary. I personally use an external drive to keep most of my files so I see no need to create more than one partition. And at least with XP I used to reformat every 3-4 months without having to backup all my stuff in advance.

 

For me, if I reformat, I want to make sure the recovery and mediadirect stays intact, but it is not possible to do it without having to use an external program to repartition your harddrive, and plus even when you specify to allocate such and scuh space to the C drive, it sometimes ends up becoming the D drive instead, and there is always the risk and chance of the partition program to accidentally mess up. I know someone who has partition magic who screwed up his M1530 and it couldnt boot up at all as a result of installing vista all onto the C drive, and then trying to create a new partition for the D drive. It just fails. I myself have tried numerous combinations, but it the end result is just not really what is desired.

 

i usually have 1 OS section ~ 30GB, rest = personal

then i clone the OS section once i get rid of the crapware and installed my programs, so anytime i need a fresh install, i just use my cloned OS section...

its just easier, b/c u dont need to backup much files before using the cloned section...

 

this is what i am in the procees of doing. i have my os exactly how i want it, prestine and virginal, but i did not not repartitiion my C:. hopefully vista disk manager will still shrink my c: partition so I can create one. if not, oh well. I have external hard drives I can put my image on but having a 200gb hard drive makes for a huge image even if it is 90% empty.

 

Many thanks for the replies and explanations

For Tianxia > yes, I meant reformatting! Sorry for the error in my original post!

For Chrysaor > Thanks. But you know, I am not an expert and I am not really comfortable doing this reformatting thing (of course, I can probably find someone who is good with comp' and ask them to do it for me!) So now, will it be a big deal if I just work with whatever there is without doing any reformatting, but by following up on some tweaks that I found in some wonderful thread here? Will doing just the tweaks help with the same reason' as you have given, mainly increasing performance, saving some space, etc etc.? And I am not going to multi-boot. I am gonna use VMware or Virtual PC.

And just for your information (if this is going to help you understand better my query) I have couple of external HD, on which I usually back up my data and files!!

Thanks again people. See you.