I've learnt the hard way not to ever trust Windows with all the programs in the same partition as the OS - sometimes it has got so corrupted that the only easy way out is to reformat the partition and reload. Yes, I know about backups and all that - but it's a damn side faster when only the OS has to be reloaded - and if you have kept all the OS upgrades safely on another partition - but reinstalling them one by one was driving me nuts.... which is why I have been looking for all the OS upgrades on one CD... :-)

98SE seems to pick up most of the installed progs in other partitions - but occasionally a few DLLs get lost from the system area and you have to reinstall a particular prog. Keeping copies of all the DLLs and other goodies from the system area seems to help though.

The 'noise' is not only fan noise but also internal HW noise thru the sound card etc. I wounder when they are going to start advertising 'quiet' systems like they do 'gamer', 'business', etc...