Can you do this, so it does not effect other drives in your computer? twice this week, I had to perform a clean system install. I had some virus which prevented my anti-virus, from working.

If the partitioned drive is effected, will it effect other drives?


Can someone plz, let me the reason why you can partitioned?

Is what you are asking:

Is it a good idea to have a dedicated partition for downloading files only, a sort of quaranteen, if you like?

????

If so, then....

Yeah. I guess so.

I have a dedicated downloads area on my machine(s) yes.

Phantasm66, can you plz, explain to me what you have and how you got it?

Yes, I am referring to a partition that is just for downloading things, like kazaa, so it does not effect my main work area? I never really thought about this, until two clean windows xp install, a few days ago.

If you open an infected file & the virus get loaded in memory, it will probably look for system files & infect them, no matter what partition they are on.

Just keep your Anti-Virus up to date & always scan the files you download before opening them. If you follow these tips, you should be fine.

PS. There's no need for a double thread.

A separate pertition is still good.

You can clean the Windows partition and then manually get rid of bad stuff on the storage partition - no memory resident executables there.

Plus, most downloading programs don't do file preallocation and downloading many things at a time will give you a very fragmented partition. And you don't want to slow down your system.