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Stephen Lawton
Acronis, Inc.
+1 (510) 285 1055, ext. 7030
stephen.lawton@acronis.com

Original article on Let's Talk Computers website

How to Organize Your Computer in the Most Efficient Way

Complete Transcript of Stephen Lawton — Acronis Interview, Host — Alan Ashendorf on Let's Talk Computers June 30, 2007

Alan: When you buy a computer, you kind of expect it to be set up the best possible way for you. But in reality, it's set up the easiest way for the manufacturer. There is a big difference. Our guest today, is Stephen Lawton, Senior Director of Strategic Marketing with Acronis. Welcome back to Let's Talk Computers, Stephen.

Stephen: It's always a pleasure to be back, Alan. Thanks for having me.

Alan: Since it's our computer and we bought it to be fast, reliable and efficient — why is it not delivered like that?

Stephen: When a manufacturer builds a computer system and they put in a disk drive, they simply put the operating system on the drive and they create (what they call a single partition for the entire drive). It's the easiest way to get machines out the door.

Alan: What exactly is partitioning and why do we really need it?

Stephen: A partition is the available real estate where you can store data on a drive. Think of a great, big box. If you have one partition, you'd throw everything into the box. That's not very efficient.

If you think of a filing cabinet with separate drawers; you could make a drawer for applications; a drawer for your operating system, and a drawer for your data — that's a much more efficient way of organizing your computer. Those drawers are effectively partitions.

Alan: This sounds so technical. Is this beyond the average consumer to understand and work with?

Stephen: Absolutely, not. It's actually very simple. Let's say that you go into a computer store and you buy a system — and many of the systems come with 250-300 Gigabyte hard disks. Now, when you want to build these drawers, Acronis has a product that's called Acronis Disk Director Suite that is wizard-driven and it asks you "how big do you want these drawers to be?" There's just a simple slider that you can slide back and forth.

What I normally recommend is about 25% of the drive should be dedicated to the operating system and then the balance of the drive can be split between programs and your data. That way, there is plenty of space to put Windows on. Certain programs will only install onto the operating system part of the disk. So, you've got plenty of real estate there for the operating system.

You put your programs, which don't change very often, into the next drawer. And then, of course your data goes onto the final section. That way when you want to back up your system, the data will change most frequently, so you can do a very quick back up, because you're only dealing with a small part of that disk.

Alan: Well, what about going one-step further? Why not set up a partition that for its sole purpose of life is a throwaway? That's where we will put our temporary files; where we're going to put our temporary Internet files and all the other stuff that Microsoft just constantly writes, erases, writes and erases — and if something goes wrong with it, we don't care about it?

Stephen: It's very simple to set up a fourth partition just for that. It's actually a very efficient way of managing the types of files that automatically get written. For example, your Internet cache files. The cache is data that's written to your hard disk, so that if you've been to a web site, you can quickly bring it up again. You don't necessarily want to keep that data around. It' just builds up your hard disk.

So, if that's on a throwaway partition, it's very easy to simply delete all those files and start again and your browser actually will work quite quickly.

Alan: Inside of Windows, you have the ability to create a partition; you have the ability to format a disk. But once you already have data that's on the disk — in Windows, it's impossible to do anything about it.

Stephen: Once you have partitions on your hard disk, if you are simply using the tools that are provided by Microsoft, you're right — it would be very difficult to change the size of those partitions. But with Acronis Disk Director Suite, you would simply point to that partition that you want to change. Let's say you need to make your data section larger and you're not using as much of the operating system section that you thought you would.

You would simply drag the little arrow to make the operating system section smaller. That would create what's called "free space", which is unallocated space on the hard disk. And then, you just move over to your data section and you would just move that arrow over to use up this unallocated free space — and voila!

You've reduced the size of your operating system partition and you've increased the size of your data partition. And you've done this all within Windows and in order to get these new settings to work; you just simply reboot your system. You don't have to close any programs while you're making these changes.

Alan: And we've been talking about a brand new system that's coming from the factory. But, this also works if you have an older system. One of the biggest problems with the older system is that you may at one time have had enough room on your C partition, (your main partition) to hold the complete operating system — plus a lot of extra space. But now, with the new operating system you updated to, it took every bit of that space and then some — and you need to change that size. Can I go back on an older system to do it?

Stephen: You most certainly can. In the automated mode of Acronis Disk Director Suite, you would simply look at the various partitions on your hard disk. Whatever partition has the most free space on it, you would want to reduce that one to create what's called unallocated space. Then you would simply move to your C partition and use up that unallocated space to make the C partition larger.

The important thing to remember here is, let's say you have a partition that is 10 Gigabytes in size. And you have 8 Gigabytes of data on that partition. The software will not allow you to reduce that partition that's smaller than the amount of data that you have on that partition, already.

We have a protection in there for the consumer so that the consumer will not damage their existing data. You can only reduce the size to whatever amount that you now have.

Alan: So, what you're saying is that it's basically fool proof for the consumer to change the partition size in order to get more space or less space?

Stephen: It's very simple to change it and in the automated mode, you are protected by several layers of protections that are built into the Program to keep the consumer from accidentally deleting data.

Interestingly, one of the problems that happen on occasion is that somebody might accidentally delete a partition, entirely. We have a tool in the Acronis Disk Director Suite that can actually find this deleted partition; restore the partition; and all the data on it. That partition is right back to being in pristine condition.

Alan: That does happen more often than what we would really like to think. It's Windows!

Stephen: And it happens to even "experienced" people. I speak from experience — having accidentally deleted partitions, myself. Having the ability with the Acronis Disk Director Suite to restore that partition is an invaluable tool. I personally love it.

Alan: But, there's another reason for setting up partitions. I may want to do what they call "multi-boot", which I mean that I want to boot multiple operating systems on the same computer. How do I do that?

Stephen: Well, you know, that's becoming very popular right now. A lot of users are very comfortable with Windows XP. They've been using it for years; they understand how it works. Here's this new operating system from Microsoft, called Vista. Maybe you want to try Vista to see if it will work on your system to see how you like it.

What you can do with Acronis Disk Director Suite is to launch a program called OS Selector. (That's short for Operating System Selector). What the OS Selector will do is create a "mezzanine", if you will, window, that will allow you that when you boot the system to select which operating system you want to point to.

Now, you would create a partition on your drive disk for Vista. You would install Vista onto that new partition. By the way, you can use this for Vista, for Linux, for a second version of Windows XP — any operating system. I'm just using Vista as an example. With OS Selector, when you turn on your computer to boot it, it will see these multiple operating systems and it will ask you "which one you want to boot?" You just simply select which one you want to use.

Now, the important thing to remember here is that applications and things you store in one operating system are not necessarily available when you're running the other operating system. So, if you've got applications that are installed into Windows XP, you have to reinstall them for Vista. That's just the nature of the way that Windows works.

Alan: Well, this would be the absolute, best thing to do — let's say you have a young kid in the house and they want to do their gaming. You could actually set up a partition just for them & call it Gaming and they can have all their games on that partition and leave your finances and all your other personal information completely off limits.

Stephen: And you can even password protect partitions, if you would like. There are a lot of ways of separating out partitions and a lot of reasons to do it. You mentioned the fact that you might want to have one partition for your child and one for the adult. You might want to have one for this operating system and one for another. There are multitudes of ways that you can slice and dice your hard disk. And these are all ways of making it convenient for the user — not necessarily for the vendor. The vendor just wants to get out as many boxes as they can, as quickly as they can. There's no value to them to partition the hard disk. The value is to the user.

Alan: I hear this horror story all the time. "My computer was doing just fine, but then Johnny got on it and he had to download some new game and the next thing that I know is that my computer doesn't boot." But, if Johnny had his own partition, his own operating system, his own set of disk files, everybody would be happy in the family.

Stephen: That's absolutely true and there's even another way that you can protect your computer. Not only can you have multiple versions of Windows running on the same machine — you can even create a hidden partition on the hard disk, where you can keep an image of your machine, by using the Acronis True Image Secure Zone. So, if there is a problem — if there is a virus that hits that machine, you can even restore the machine back from this hidden partition.

Alan: I've always been told that you can only boot from the first partition. So, if I'm setting up multiple partitions, I have to boot from that first partition. But, you can get around that restriction, can't you?

Stephen: Yes, you can get around that with the Multi-boot Manager, absolutely. Because, the Multi-boot Manager allows you to select which operating system you're going to be running.

You know, the cool thing is that you can even add extra hard disks to your computer and put operating systems on different hard disks. With that Multi-boot Manager, you can point to another hard disk and say I want to boot from over there. It doesn't need to necessarily be on the primary hard disk.

Alan: How difficult is it to set up a new operating system, in order to boot from?

Stephen: It's not all that difficult. You would first create a new partition and you would format that partition. You could install Windows XP Pro, for example on the new partition and create what's called the MTFS file system on that new partition. It's very simple to do.

You would install the Operating System; you would install the Programs, just the same as you would on a new computer.

Alan: What are we looking at as far as the cost of setting up partitioning?

Stephen: The suggested retail price of Acronis Disk Director Suite is just $49.99. That price, incidentally, has not changed in 5 years, even though we've been adding a lot of new features and capabilities to the Product. For $50, you will have the ability to divide your disk, slice & dice it, however you want. You will have the ability to create a multi-boot system and you have the ability to restore a partition that might be accidentally deleted or somehow damaged.

Alan: And if somebody would like to find out more information about Disk Director 10 Suite, where would they go?

Stephen: They can come to http://www.acronis.com

Alan: Steve, as always, it's been our pleasure to have you as our guest on Let's Talk Computers, talking about how we can set up our computer to run in its optimum. And we hope to have you back on the air again, real soon.

Stephen: Thanks so much. It's always a pleasure to come to visit with your listeners.