Curious why new laptop only has one partition

[Page]

All recent laptops that I have bought have had two partitions (plus a hidden recovery partition) but the latest one (VAIO) has just a single partition.

I had always seen the split between programs and data as a sensible one so was wondering if anyone knew why they might have moved away from this.

[consultant]

some companies do, some dont.

Technically, storing programs and files is only good for house keeping - if your HD fails, you will not be able to access either partitiion!

[Moneyman]

It is much better to get one partition and then you can do what you want. i have one of those netbooks and the partitions are set and we have spent ages trying to get round it because some programs wont play ball.

Be happy.

[stugster]

Technically, storing programs and files is only good for house keeping - if your HD fails, you will not be able to access either partitiion!

I am totally against having recovery partitions or storing the OS on a partition on the same drive for this very reason. Giving a customer a CD with that data on it is pretty straight forward and I've never understood why companies don't just do this anyway (oh yeh, scraping that tiny profit margin, that's why).

I had a client last month whose hard drive died. I had to install a new drive for her and reinstall the OS. She then complained (and demanded) that she wanted the recovery partition back the way it was previously (even though I had supplied her a bootable recovery CD, and a Drivers and Initial Software CD).

No matter how I tried to explain it to her, she was completely adamant that this usually useless partition should eat up 5% of her storage capacity.

The first thing I did when I received my HP laptop a few years back was get in contact with them to get the drivers and Windows CD posted out. They did this first class and free for me, and I immediately removed the partition :)

[JoyDivision]

Slug I might have been tempted to just walk out. Or tell her she would need to get the CDs of HP.

I hate the damn things too, when I got my Dell laptop the first thing I did was Format C: and reinstalled Windows on the CD Dell kindly gave me.

[KM-Tiger]

I hate the damn things too, when I got my Dell laptop the first thing I did was Format C: and reinstalled Windows on the CD Dell kindly gave me.

Which has the advantage of ditching all the vendor-supplied garbage that you don't want.

[Place of design]

Be really careful with this approach. Often some of the software supplied is very specific to the machine (drivers etc.) Laptops in prticular may have revision specific drivers, that you just cant get elsewhere

Teaching people aout abckups is like floging a dead dog, unless they loose all thier work several times, it just doenst go in