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Q: Recently, I was asked by a relative to tune up their system because their hard drive was full  After looking at their drive, I saw that they have a 120 gb drive, but it was partitioned into 20 gb and 100 gb partitions.  I explained that they needed to start moving stuff to the other partition.  They asked if there was a way to just make the hard drive all one partition and then they didn’t need to worry about it.  I did some research about the best solution that I found was Partition Magic.  However, I am reluctant to spend $70 – $80 for a program that I am only going to use once.  Is there another method to delete the unused partition and allocate that space to the main partition without removing everything off the drive, using something like FDISK and then reinstalling everything? 

– Jeff W.
Fort Walton Beach, FL

A: FDISK is strictly used for creating new partitions.  If you try to join existing partitions, you will lose all your data.  Partition Magic is probably the best-known partition manager around, and it does exactly what you’re describing (plus a whole lot more) but, as you discovered, it comes at a price, and I don’t blame you for being “reluctant” to buy it.  (Hey Symantec!  How about a “Partition Magic Lite” for people who just want to join partitions without all the other bells and whistles?)  Let me give you a couple of things to think about, Jeff.  First, I saw a terabyte drive in last Sunday’s ads for under $100.  You could simply add a sizeable new drive, load Windows, and copy-over all the data.  The net result is a system that’s future-proofed against mass-storage needs for a long time to come, for just slightly more than it would cost you to purchase the commercial product of choice, plus you’d have a decent drive left over to do something cool with, like mount it in an external USB or NAS enclosure.  Alternately, you could seek a free solution online.  I Googled “disk partition software” and got lots of hits.  Standard cautions apply here!  You often get exactly what you pay for when something is free.

Q: I hope that you can help me speed up my laptop. I have a HP Pavilion dv8000…XP Home edition sys…..Service pack is 3.0…..AMD Turion ™ 64 Mobile Technology ML-32  with current speed 1790 MHz…512 MB Memory ….75GB hard drive.  The unit is extremely slow. Is there anything that I can clean-up … clear-out…. anything at all to make the unit speed up? 

– Bill P.
Fort Walton Beach, FL

A: I continue to receive e-mails like this from people wanting to know why their computer is running so slow.  This includes things like screens that don’t update fast enough (including a “window shade” effect as the screen blanks and re-draws), and systems that take forever to boot.  The main problem with almost all these systems is too little RAM.  You can do a rough check of your memory by right-clicking on “My Computer” and selecting “Properties”.  At the bottom of the window it says “Computer:” and gives a summary, which should include the amount of installed memory.  If you have 1 GB of RAM or less, you should really consider upgrading.  By the way, this doesn’t just apply to laptops, it applies to all computers!