Got an old Compaq Presario laptop with a 6Gb hard drive partitioned into 2 and 4 respectively; it came with Win98, but I boobed and loaded WinXP, which seems to have eaten up all the 2Gb operating system drive. This is causing me a lot of heartburn. Without getting too technical, would it be a good idea to remove the partition and if so, how? Or do I need to add extra memory and if so, how? Thanx in advance from a non-geek.

There are far more qualified contibutors here than me but here's my opinion.

Memory and hard disc space are different. 6gig is small for a hard disk these days but useable. There is software which will manage partitions but I don't know if it can sort out existing partitions, ie ones that it has not created in the first place. You could reformat and partition the disc using fdisk into a single partition (and wipe everything that is currently on there) and then re-install XP.

There are a couple of MS support articles here:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=313348

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q255867/

Many thanks for the tips and web-links - will check them out, but my German ain't that sharp!

They don't appear in german to me - or are you referring to my computer gobbledegook?

Sorted, many thanks for the tips

For anyone with partitioning troubles, look for Partition Magic. Brilliant piece of software! Includes the option to resize partitions without losing data.