Now we have two partitions on the hard drive, just as we did before the formatting. What I wanted was a smaller C:\ partition and a larger D:\ partition. Vista can help with that, too!

On my drive, my main partition with Vista was about 235 gigs. First, I backed up all of my important stuff and the used space shrunk accordingly. When I was finished, I had about 75 gigs used and the rest was open. I right clicked the drive in the Drive Management window and chose Shrink Volume. A little menu popped up and I chose to shrink it to about 180 gigs, which left me with 55 gigs of unallocated space. Once Windows had finished shrinking the partition, or volume as they call it, the drive now had three windows on it, the large Vista partition, the unallocated partition that was left after the shrink job and, finally, the old recovery partition.

The unallocated space was then formatted to NTFS and then, finally, I was able to Extend it to include the old recovery partition. Now, in round figues, I had a volume or partition of 180 gigs which held my old Vista installation and a new volume of about 70 gigs. I named the second partition Windows 7, just to keep it straight when I was installing the new trial version of Windows. Vista was running great, albeit slowly, and I didn’t want to lose it.

After all of this, which took longer to write about than to actually do, I was able to pop in the Windows 7 DVD and reboot the laptop, choose to boot from the CD/DVD drive and install Windows. Installation didn’t take long at all, nothing compared to the old versions of Windows and, except for a lack of drivers for my laptop video card, everything went well.

Your mileage may vary with all of this but, hopefully, I’ve given you the basics of partitioning your drives in Vista. Remember, above all, to back up your important data regularly and, of course, before you try any of this stuff on your own computer. Backups save information and lots and lots of headaches and heartaches. Don’t put it off!