"If they don't use NTFS they will never get the experience."
That's an absurd reason. An OS should be transparent to the user. The user should 
not have to become an OS expert; that has been a major flaw of every M$ operating 
system ever released. An easy observation when I managed 500 PCs and 60 Macs was 
that almost no one knew anything about their operating systems, but the Mac users 
all knew how to get a lot more out of their systems than virtually all of the PC 
users. It was easy to see how much time the PC users lost because they did not know 
how to maintain their file systems, because it was too darn complex (for them). Well 
NTFS takes that up another notch. Easily 20% of the problems posted on this site 
are directly traceable to the fact that the user does not understand how to deal 
with NTFS.

Your contention that fdisk should not be used for partitioning is equally ridiculous. 
True, it's not as slick as using XP's GUI, but it's the only way that M$ will allow 
us to get there with disks greater 32GB. They placed this arbitrary limitation on 
users for the same reason that they have crammed NTFS down their users' throats. 
They always think they know what is best for their users, when history demonstrates 
that they almost never do.

FAT32 is the best choice for nearly all home users. The only exception that I can 
think of is for those that need to make files that are greater 4GB. I have one NTFS 
partition for that purpose, and it is by far the biggest pain in the neck to deal 
with. I know that I could solve some of these issues by wasting my time learning 
a little bit about NTFS permissions. But at my age, I don't particularly want to 
waste my time just for the sake of learning how it works. Like most users, I just 
want to use my computer. I really never wanted to spend a huge excessive amount of 
time becoming proficient at the OS. But having chosen to use XP, I was forced into 
that. 

I will continue to set up machines with FAT32, and I will continue to point out the 
huge benefit that FAT32 has over NTFS - EASE OF USE. The benefits of NTFS that you 
speak of are largely imaginary.







On Sunday, April 10, 2005 at 5:10 am, Mac wrote:

>XP Operating System


>If they don't use NTFS they will never get the experience. NTFS is necessary for 

>XP Professional and is recommended for drives or partitions over 32Gb.

>

>NTFS outperforms FAT32 on larger drives and has less drive overhead.

>

>Large drives formatted to FAT32 will have very large FAT tables.

>

>With a drive image of the operating system drive, there is no difficulty using NTFS.

>
Mac

>

>WINDOWS 
SUPPORT  
>HREF="http://www.crucial.com">RAM 

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