If you don’t know what partitioning is, here’s an excerpt from a Wikipedia article about Disk partitioning:

Disk partitioning is the creation of separate divisions of a hard disk. Once a disk is divided into several partitions, directories and files of different categories may be stored in different partitions. More partitions provide more control but too many become cumbersome. The way space management, access permissions and directory searching are implemented depends upon the type of file system installed on a partition. Careful consideration of the size of the partition is necessary as the ability to change the size depends on the file system installed on the partition.

There are plenty of good reasons to partition your hard disk, based on the article in Wikipedia, but here’s some of the benefit I see in it:

** it makes your system if not drastically, at least a little faster

** helps you become organized. You know, organization can be applied anywhere, most especially in our own computers at home. If you’re a neat freak, and is more at ease when everything around you – including files on your computer – is organized and neat, then this is another step forward toward that

** separating the location of the OS from the actual files adds up to a speedier system start. Think about it, if only the OS files are in your boot drive, the system can boot faster because there aren’t much files to check (provided that your program files are in another partition).

So, if you’re a heavy multitasker who likes opening multiple  windows because you have to get a lot of things done, incorporating this style on your next reformat can contribute to a more stable and faster system. Not only does it help in that, it can also help take a step forward toward organizing your files. You’ll never know, maybe you can clean up your desktop next.

Edit: How can you partition your disk drive? You’re gonna have to reformat your computer. Why? Because, the disk partitioning takes place when you install Windows. Please remember that the partition for the boot drive (or where your Windows installation is) should be big enough to hold a few log files and such. Give it at least, 10 or 15 percent of the whole disk space. You’re free to do whatever you want with the remaining. If I may suggest, you should install programs in the other drive, not in the boot drive. This enables, like I said a couple of times, for the system to reboot faster.

Now, if you’re such a neat freak, you can create three or more partitions, depending on if you’re planning to install a different OS aside from Window (like, say, Linux), but this is just for hyper geeks who wants to try out open source OS. You can create three partitions – one for WIndows, one for Linux and the rest is for files, OR, you can create four partitions – one for Windows, one for Linux, one for programs and the rest is for files. But that’s a little too much of a good thing I guess.