It is always smarter to install your OS on a seperate small hd or partition. One only a gb or more in size over (IE: XP 4gb). Then move your program files, common files, my documents, and favorites to the other hard drive or partition. Why? Fragmentation, and Searching. Everytime you open, change, move, save, really do almost ANYTHING to a file, it moves around on the partition, or is fragmented amongst it. This causes more holes and data for windows to read through to find what it is looking for on the HD. Same thing with having all your programs there. Even if you never ran them, it is still more data and files for Windows to scan the hd through looking for what it needs. And Searching, well as it scans from 0 to 4gb and over and over it finds things faster. Again, improving perfomance. I once went 6yrs without re-installing 98 after learning all of this from a HD vendor's website. It now is also all over the internet, and for most companies a common standard with their higher up pre-builts. My 2 cents.