I presently have a 3 yr. old Dimension 4300 with Windows XP Home SP1, 1.6Ghz, Pent. 4, 512 mb memory, with a separate CD-RW drive. I have the Roxio(basic) software that originally came installed on the pc. I believe it is 5.0. I presently have a 40G hard drive that still has about 18G free. I presently just do an occasional backup to a cd-r of some files such as my word documents, spreadsheets, favorites, and some other files that I deem important. I don’t do these backups often enough partly because of the time it takes to do them and I was never sure what software to utilize to help make these backups easier.

I am thinking about purchasing a second 80G hard drive to install to help do backups. From what I have seen on some posts I should purchase imaging software such as Symantec Ghost or Acronis image. This will enable me to backup everything on the master- boot drive to the second drive. That part I get, but can incremental backups be done using either of these two imaging software programs or is that not worth worrying about because backing up the full hard drive to a 2nd drive would not be that time consuming anyway?

 Another question involves partitioning. Unfortunately, when I purchased the pc I did not have the knowledge I have now, which I’ll admit is still limited concerning computers, so I did not immediately reformat the original drive to 2 partitions so as to keep the OS on its own partition. And right now I don’t have the time to clean out and load everything again from scratch so I guess I’m looking for the easy way. Anyhow, if I would continue to keep my original drive as it is now, the boot drive, and use the new, larger (80G) drive as my backup, I am thinking I should partition the new drive into 2 volumes, each at 40G, one 40G to match my original drive for backups, and the second 40G to use as more storage, even though I then have no way to back up the second volume. That is where I need an idea of what to do. Could I split/partition the second 40 into 2-20G(40/20/20) or would that be pushing things. And also do I have to buy additional software to partition the drive or does software come with the new hard drives (Western Digital) to perform the partitioning? And will the new drive need formatting? Or is the formatting down when the hard drive is partitioned? That part I am confused about.

 Sorry about so many questions. But I have read many posts in this DELL forum for a couple of years now and I know there are many knowledgeable people out there that are kind enough to freely offer their time to help others. And I have come to this forum and been given great advice in the past. I am just not sure what to do and I am trying to do some research before I dive into this. Any help/suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thank you

Jim