Windows 7 forum: Poll: How often do you defrag your hard drive?

You're sort of coming off as one of those guys who thinks, "Anyone who doesn't agree with me is clearly of inferior intelligence." I'm very willing to believe partitioning could be beneficial, the truth is I simply don't know. But if you can't even be bothered to explain WHY it's better for the computer, I'm not just going to take your word for it.

Especially because I've read a lot of tech advice articles, and even spoken to a bunch of tech-savvy people, and I've never heard any mention of partitioning from them.

To separate operating system and executable files from your data. Then, when any computer maintenance or OS operation (imaging, defragging) has to be done, it can be done in the right place, partition C: and not on data which don't need it (as often).

Makes data backup much easier, too. Who wants to drill down to

C:\Users\John X Doe\AppData\Roaming\FileMaker\FileMaker Pro\5.0\data

to back up FileMaker database files. If they are in E:\John X Doe\Documents, how much better that is.

Partitioning can be done on any computer, any OS. Windows XP, Vista and 7 have this ability built in.

The one reason not to partition is because it is very hard to get correct. Using one of my systems as an example. My directories are as follows
1. windows (40 gigabytes),
2. program files (10 gigabytes),
3. program files (x86) (50 gigabytes),
4. the hidden directory programdata (10 gigabytes)
This means that the minimum size of the "C" partition is more like 120 gigabytes rather the 80 gigabytes as suggested. The directory "c:\users\" contains part of the registry in the hidden file "c\users\\ntuser.dat" which means moving the default locations correctly is not that simple.
Moving the swap file to another partition is useless, since there is but one disk positioner per drive, therefore a disk seek on one partition, will interfere with a seek on another partition on the same disk. There will be some performance increase if swap is on a different disk. However with the large memories of today swapping has become less of a performance issue.
Back in the Stone Age, I was a UNIX system administrator. At that time a one gigabyte disk was very large we had five. Almost every week I had to repartition and reassign the disks because of capacity issues. I was running the disks between 90 and 105 percent full. Therefore I do have partitioning experience.

When I said "move" data directories I should have said "assign a new" data directory from within applications.

I agree with you on swap files. They're pretty much cast in stone since WinXP. Vista will let you create another swap file elsewhere but it won't let you delete the one in C. So...why futz around with it.

Well for me, I depend on the feedback given by the hard drive test done by Windows before you start the defray process. If I physically see huge gaps, even with the OS saying that it is okay, I still make it a point to push through with it.I know that displays how I could be OC by I would not care that much as long as I keep all files in order. And sometimes, you would know when you need to do it if you have moved files up and down a number of times.