Originally Posted by Mac the Knife
PS: My wife's Asus notebook also came with the primary partition formatted as FAT32. I've no idea why they do this. First thing I did was convert is to NTFS.
The manufacturers may be doing this to prevent people from locking themselves out of their computer or running into permission issues. If you happen to set the permissions wrong, or forget a password, you're in big trouble under NTFS. With FAT32 you (and any viruses or malware apps running) can get at every file without much trouble.
I know personally I've had cases where after upgrading my WinXP machine and reinstalling the system, I no longer had permissions to open some files. It isn't hard to fix if you know what you're doing, but I don't think the average person will find it easy.