I have just bought an Asus laptop for my daughter to take to university. The 80GB hard drive is partitioned in two: one half contains Windows XP and other applications and uses the FAT32 file system; the other half is empty and is NTFS. I asked the seller, Mesh, why and they didn't know, so I contacted Asus. They don't know why their machines are configured this way either! David Reggiori
NTFS, Windows' New Technology File System, was only introduced in July 1993, so it may take some manufacturers a while to catch on!
It would make more sense to install XP on the NTFS drive, and XP includes a Convert command that will convert the FAT32 disk to NTFS on a reboot. However, I can't see that your daughter would benefit greatly (the conversion would offer a bit more disk space). Also, many suppliers' help lines -- where people work from scripts -- tend to have trouble coping with systems that are not configured exactly as shipped. Under the circumstances, I'd leave it as it is.
