Echoing cruzan's advice about Virtual Memory. It certainly is worth having a (fixed size) swap file in a partition made available on a seperate disk - that way both disks are read simultaneosly. I follow the same strategy, and also re-asign my temp files to the same partition which alleviates fragmentation. The biggest culprit for fragmentation problems tends to be Temporary Internet Files, and again I insist on a seperate partition solely for Temp Internet Files. I used to love fdisk, but static drive letter asignment in Win XP makes setting up partitions a breeze. I've a total of 15 partitions (on two very fast hard drives) and the time spent planning their allocation was time very well spent.