Welcome to Seven Forums [4]

Welcome to everybody who gives me pie (Jk) Welcome everybody.

Having recently bought a laptop with Windows 7 installed, I once again had to learn to drive a new OS. At nearly 60, I have started with DOS and hoped XP would be around forever! But I know I have to move with the times.

After spending weeks trying to figure out how to free up a partition so I could break the 1TB drive into manageable logical drives (it had all 4 primary partitions used), I then started to customize it.

The first thing I did was load Classic Shell so the Start Menu and Explorer worked like XP. Then I noticed the problem of Explorer Templates and ZIP files showing as folders. I thought I would Google for some answers, without much faith in finding any. Then I came across this forum.

I found the two tutorials to fix those problems and at last Windows 7 is operating the way I want it to.

I would like to thank Shawn (and the other members) for this forum and expect to come here often looking for answers. I doubt I will be able to contribute much, so I am posting here as a means of thanking the forum for the help I have already received.

Taming a new OS is always a steep learning curve and places like this are vital in helping to do so.

Hello Perth Aussie and welcome to Seven Forums.

rigz said:

.. i was stunned with Perth Aussie's question cant get the exact idea though but im happy that in this forum you got the answer.

Thanks for the welcome guys.

I wasn't actually asking any questions, just a quick summary of what I've done to my installation.

The two tutorials I mentioned are this one and this one. They fixed problems that had been annoying me and I could not figure out how to solve them.

The partitioning of the drive was a hardware thing. The laptop, like most computers nowadays, does not come with Windows installation discs, but has the data stored in a Recovery partition. The OS is on another partition and two others have the Boot data and HP Tools.

That meant all 4 primary partitions Windows allows were being used. I like to break my installation into separate "drives", shrinking the C drive to around 100GB then creating D, E, F or more "logical" drives for storing my data. This keeps the C drive clean and quick to defrag and means I can backup Windows and any apps without the need to backup all my data at the same time.

But I couldn't do this because the maximum of 4 partitions was already used. The solution was to burn the Recovery partition to 4 DVD's then delete it. This freed up a partition I could convert to logical instead of primary and split it into as many "drives" as I wanted .