Maximum PC

Got it. Thanks!

While I've built a couple of computers, I've never messed around with the Dell laptop partitions - never had this issue before. I greatly appreciate the "hand holding", as I most certainly don't want to hose my laptop. I'll do my best to pass it forward when I get the opportunity.

I probably need to get off my "tired old man" mentality too

Let me know how this goes. I had to do this when I upgraded my laptop's HDD to an SSD.

I checked the partitions on my desktop, for comparison. It's a recent DIY build, which I used an upgrade disk to install Windows 8, same approach as the laptop (told it to keep nothing, then re-installed all the software, documents, pictures, etc which I had backed up. On the desktop I have two partitions: The C drive, which has "System, Boot, Page File, Active, Crash Dump, and Primary Partition" listed; and an "unallocated" partition. I created a system recovery disk and have backed it up with a system image. I use the Windows backup software to back it up weekly.

I've been operating from the premise that having the "System" stuff on the same partition as the other stuff is ok since I have the recovery disk and the backup. Is there a reason not to go the same approach with the laptop? Or conversely, should I move the "System" on the desktop to a separate partition?

This is a whole new part of computer building/maintenance for me.

The whole idea of keeping the system part on another partition is because if your OS partition goes kaput, you'll get a "Insert boot disk" message on start up. The only way to get out of this is to have a recovery environment in the form of a Windows Install disk or a bootable USB drive that has a recovery image on it.

If you have it separate, then you can at least go into the recovery environment and say restore from a system image.

Won't the repair disk I created cover me if the OS partition goes kaput, and it has the system part on it?

I haven't gone quite that far, though on my desktop, I have my OS and applications on the SSD and my documents/pictures/music/etc on a separate hard drive.