I have an Inspiron 700m of which I am the original owner. I just ordered a new Hitachi Travelstar 7K100 80GB 7200rpm drive. I have done only one OS install prior to this when I assembled a desktop PC but that was several years ago and I was following an online guide (MySuperPC) virtually step-by-step.

I have contacted Dell and they sent me a reinstall copy of the OS (XP Home) on CD.

My biggest concern is partitioning. I'm really not clear on what this is all about or how I should go about doing this. I've had one person tell me not to partition at all. Another tell me to make it 50%-50% and another tell me to make a 5GB partition just for the OS.

This a basic email, web browsing, document reading type of machine that I use when I'm traveling.

Can anyone recommend an online guide I can follow to install the OS onto my new hard drive? I've seen a few, but they seem to be geared more toward recovery type reinstallation and several seem geared more toward "power users." I'm looking for something pretty basic.

Thanks in advance.

Tipsy