Windows XP Partitions

[Sental]

I'm helping a friend who got a second hand pc from another friend.

 

He has an old pentium 4 based dell computer running windows XP with a 150GB hard drive.

 

He has two partitions on the drive, the main active one at bout 146GB formatted as ntfs and a second FAT32 based partition of not much under 3GB which is inactive.

We don't know where the MBR is, and I am having to help him out over the telephone only so I can't see the machine. This is due to distance between us.

 

He has tried one of his old programmes to recover some of the files from the second partition, they were coming up as os files.

 

What I primarily want to know is, will it be save to delete the partition? I understand that if the MBR is in there that it would have to be rebuilt, that's not a big issue though.

 

As secondary issues:

He is also having issues with slowness of the PC, while somewhat expected due to the age of the system he not that happy with it.

The RAM usage is resonable, 500MB to 750MB of his 1GB totals varying by usage, the processor load isn't maxing out and there doesn't seem to be any none system processes running.

For instance 5 minutes to start up (from pressing the button to having the desktop & icons loaded), another couple to load My Computer and a further minute to 90 seconds for the icons to load inside of my computer.

 

While my primary concern is whether we can remove the FAT32 partition safely or not; any thoughts on the slowness he's experiencing is appreciated.

[neocronix2]

I dont really know what the second partition is for, but if it's generated by the os the exact name will tell you something probably. I also have a similar pc like that with only 512mb or Ram and is was slow as hell. I dont know if there is a lot of junk on the hard drive but a fresh install of windows would probably improve performance a little bit. I installed a light linux distro on my old pc and it was quicker but still too slow for daily use in my opinion.

[HPWebcamAble]

He is also having issues with slowness of the PC, while somewhat expected due to the age of the system he not that happy with it.

 

Probably a combination of the processor's speed and the hard drive's speed

 

An SSD would really help but if he can afford it I would recommend just building a new system entirely

[Sental]

I dont really know what the second partition is for, but if it's generated by the os the exact name will tell you something probably. I also have a similar pc like that with only 512mb or Ram and is was slow as hell. I dont know if there is a lot of junk on the hard drive but a fresh install of windows would probably improve performance a little bit. I installed a light linux distro on my old pc and it was quicker but still too slow for daily use in my opinion.

 

Thanks for the idea, I will check the name with him tomorrow.

 

Probably a combination of the processor's speed and the hard drive's speed

 

An SSD would really help but if he can afford it I would recommend just building a new system entirely

 

That's what I thought. The budget doesn't run for anything at the moment, but I will be building a replacement system for him in the next 1 to 2 years when it's viable for him.