Just like your house has more rooms, your hard drive has one or more partitions that are used to help you organize your data better, but working with them is much easier than building a house.

What is a partition used for?

Leaving the technical stuff aside, partitioning a hard drive is an operation that results in more virtual drives. The practical uses of these logical drive divisions include:

• the ability to setup multiple operating systems on your computer
• a better data organization
• an increase in overall computer performance
  

Drives with more partitions are faster than large, single partition drives and using a partition for virtual memory only can increase your system's performance.

Do I really need more partitions? One looks fine to me!

Some of your friends may tell you that having only one partition is enough, but don't believe them! You don't have to be a power user to use your computer the best way it is possible. Getting even the last drop of performance out of your computer without overclocking sounds like a good advice. Having more partitions is one of those easy things that can help you with this!

How to create a partition

Since most new computers today come with Windows Vista already installed, your hard drive should have a partition created already, so we'll resize it and add new ones.

First of all, you should know that after you used your computer with a single partition on its hard drive, the files will become fragmented, and you may not resize it properly, so before everything else, be sure to defragment your drive. Now, backup your data, "just in case", and let's start!

• Click on the Start menu
• Right click on My Computer and click on Manage
• If you get a User Account Control dialog here, simply click Continue
• In the left pane, choose the Storage category and open Disk Management. What you will find here are the partitions on your hard drive
• Right click on the partition that you wish to change.
• Choose Shrink Volume to shrink the selected partition
• Enter the new size for the partition, and click Shrink
• Now, you will notice that the partition is smaller, and some free space is available to create a new one; right click on the "free space" area.
• Choose "New Simple Volume" from the menu that appears, then click Next.

By default, Windows Vista will use all the free available space to create the new partition. Change the size if you need, or simply click Next if you agree with the default size.

Now that your new partition is almost created, you have to baptize it, so choose a drive letter and click Next.

At last, you should change the file system settings and format your new drive. In most cases, the NTFS file system using the default allocation unit size and a Quick Format should be fine. If you want a nick name for your new partition, baptize it again, using a suggestive name, such as "Documents", for example. Now, you new partition, will be also known as "Documents". Click Next...and you're done!

Related articles:

• Using a partition for your swap file
• Defragment your hard drive and increase computer speed