I have a Sony PCV-RS520 computer, Pentium 4, 3GHZ , 512 Mb DDR, 160 GB hard drive. I've had it for 3 years and was computer illiterate when I bought it. Windows XP was pre-installed. Pretty much started it up and let it configure itself. It partitioned itself into a 6.0 GB drive with no designation, a 13.9 GB C: drive, and a 129 GB D: drive.

Well, pretty soon the C: drive is filling up and the computer's telling me it can't function without more space on C:. I discover I have a D: drive, drag my photos, music, documents over there, and things go fine for a while. Of course with additional software, windows updates and security updates, C:drive once again fills up. I start one by one removing software: first, printmaster, then extraneous photo and music software, and then the kid's programs. Still it fills up and I am down to a minimum amount of programs. And yet there is this large empty area over on D: drive.

This is how I plan to deal with it. First, I bought an external 300 GB drive, installed Norton Ghost, and have backed C:,D: drives onto the external drive using Ghost. I have also copied my music, photos, documents to the external drive without Ghost. Using the disk management program in Windows XP, I am going to delete the Logical, Extended partitiion D: drive, leaving me hopefully only with a large C: drive.

(START>CONTROL PANEL>PERFORMANCE AND MAINTENANCE>ADMINISTRATIVE TOOLS>COMPUTER MANAGEMENT>STORAGE>DISK MANAGEMENT)

I can add an actual internal D: drive later.

My question: How much trouble am I going to get into doing this? Am I better off backing up my documents, then hitting the Viao recovery icon which takes it back to its original factory condition (no boot disk comes with the computer), making sure no D: drive is created, then install a new security program, and wait for hours for Windows to update and re-install all my other software? This seems a longer and more complicated procedure.

Any help of course is appreciated, Thanks.