Right. It's just a fragmentation thing really. Even if it's been ages since you last defragmented your drive, check out how fragmented it's actually gotten. Windows XP seems to do an ok job of keeping that in check. Unless your drive is heavilly fragmented with files you are working with, it's doubtful you'd notice any difference in speed. So, you probably wouldn't need to worry about setting up a partition. It definitely won't hurt your CPU. If you're concerned about speed on your harddrive, I recomend going with an SATA RAID set up. PRices will still be going down but I just upgraded my machine to use one for video capture purposes. Even if your HD were to get fragmented, the odds of feeling it through a disk read or write at that point is pretty unlikely.