- Use NTFS file system. Unavailable in the Home edition, unfortunately, this makes the computer more stable if somebody cuts power while writing to the harddisk.
Actually, this is false. The 650Mhz Dell Inspiron 5000 laptop in my briefcase, which upgraded effortlessly to XP Home Edition from Windows ME even though Dell disavows support for XP on that machine and advises against the upgrade, has only 2 disk partitions on its 20GB hard drive, both of which are NTFS (one with 512-byte clusters, the other with 2k clusters).
The conversion to NTFS is neither done by default during the upgrade nor offered as an option. To do it, you have to run the barely-documented "convert" program, which is installed with XP home edition. The "convert" program is sort of a cripple, and if you want bigger-than-512-byte clusters you have to back up, format the partition for NTFS with specified cluster size, and restore, etc. It's all something most home users won't know about, won't want to know about, and shouldn't try. But it is possible--even easy--for knowledgable users.
--QS |
