One strange thing that I noticed as soon as I got my Extensa. Out of the box, the 160GB hard drive is split into two partitions, drive C: and D:, each partition about 70GB in size. They refer to D: as the Data drive. Some people may like it like this, but I don't. In the Windows environment, I prefer to just use one partition, then backup data to external drives.
The reason I prefer to handle my Window's partitions in this fashion is that programs always seem to default to the C: drive, and I am too lazy to change that. The MyDocuments, Pictures, Music folders also default to the same drive Windows is installed on. As a matter of fact, my C: partition almost filled up because I was working with so many photos.
I'm not an experienced Vista user by any means. The other day I happened to stumble upon a way to repartition my hard drive on the fly. The funny thing is that Microsoft hid this extremely powerful feature from us, so many people probably are not aware of it.
Hit your Start icon, then select Computer. This will pull up what I call the file explorer window. Now, right click on Computer, as I did below, and choose "Manage".
After you left click on Manage, you will probably have to go through a few nag prompts, just click Yes or Ok or whatever will get us to the next step. The Computer Management window will come up. On the left hand side of the window, select "Disk Management" and you will have a screen that looks like:
Now, do you see the area on my picture where it says ACER (C:) 139.28 GB NTFS? The computer right out of the box will have an ACER (C:) and ACER(D:) partition. The first month I had my laptop, I never used my D: partition for anything so it was empty.
CAUTION: Before you proceed, make sure that there is no data you need on the D: partition!
Now if you right click on the ACER (D:) partition you will be greeted with options like these:
This is really simple. Making sure you are over the D: partition, choose Delete Volume. You will now have around 70GB of unpartitioned space.
Right click on the C: partition, and choose expand volume. You can expand the C: partition to take up all of the unallocated space. Your 160GB Harddrive is now all on one partition (except for that 9.77GB one-not sure what that is, let's not mess with it). The REALLY cool part is that you did all of this without even rebooting the computer.
Who woulda ever thought the people at Microsoft would let us reallocate a live partition like that?
So, the laptop is doing just super. I'll check back in a few months with another update. So far Acer gets two thumbs up from me.
