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Hello Phillip, Please don't even think about it, whilst it's true that you can still copy files as normal regardless of file-system, FAT32 is adequately sufficient and in many ways easier to recover data from. The operation to change the file-system should only be performed if you think you have a reliable supply, perhaps you have a battery back-up unit? Any power-failure would potentially leave a whole load of meaningless bits, and thus data loss. It's a little bit of a surprise that XP home is installed on a FAT32 partition, did you upgrade from an earlier version of Windows? A lot of people have criticized FAT32 in recent years, but as long as you don't share any folders on it in a home network connected to the net, you don't really have any problems. Just run ScanDisk or Chkdisk on it every week and all will be fine. FAT32 is faster and requires no over-head on the drive, i.e will not eat up a large amount of space just for the file-system. For this reason NTFS is not really the best option for a drive of 6GB or less. And despite advertising, NTFS can equally loose data on a bad-shutdown. Finally, security is often mooted as being better on NTFS, whilst this is true, what really matters is what applications you have installed on your computer. Since anything below Windows Vista has a global access model, as long as your logged in with the appropriate rights any program can theoretically access anything which renders the secure file-system useless. By being scrutinizing with what you'll download, you'll have a happy computing experience. 99.9% of spyware etcetera infect computers with trojan means. In other words, often it is a program that you downloaded voluntarily thinking it was something legitimate, like a cute calender or something. Hope this helps. If your computer is running fine, then it is. Best Wishes, Steve. philip madsen wrote:
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