thefurryone The Incredible Shrinking Drive I'm getting a laptop very soon, and I'd heard that hard drives that were too big wound up "losing space" because the cluster size was too big. How big, really, should the biggest partition on a hard drive be? I humbly beseech you, oh etc. etc. insert kissing up here. ^_^ Otakon If you're running Windows NT, Windows 2000, or Windows XP, and use the NTFS (NT file system) formatting, you needn't worry about cluster sizes or losing space. Likewise if you're going to install Linux and use ext2fs or ext3fs, or resierfs, there's no fear of losing space. The system will handle hundreds of GBs no problem (and it's impossible right now to find a laptop with greater than 80gb anyway). If you're getting a Mac (my personal favorite), just use HFS+, and again you'll see no problems. Otakon If you're using any other flavor of Windows (Windows 95 OSR2, Windows 98, or Windows Me), you're going to want to use FAT32 if available, which should be fine up to 32gb (which is more or less the norm anyway), else if you're stuck witn FAT on the original release of Windows 95, you're going to want to partition the drive into 2 or more logical drives of roughly equal size. If you're running >> 20gb, I really do suggest you use Windows 2000 or Windows XP. Otakon Oh! And don't forget to ~patch~ Back to school means lots of new viruses, trojans, and worms!