I am very confused by all the recommendations for partition sizes that I have seen quoted all over the place as they all differ because of the same reason (?).

Suppose that I basically just want to dial-up and check my email every day, write .doc stuff, do some spreadsheet and graphing and time management stuff, do some internet banking, and browse sites just for reading text and nothing else, and I want all the security stuff plus hook up to a network at work. I am comfortable with command line. If I have a 850MB hd, what sizes do you recommend. What about a 1.3GB hd? Were talking about an old but still intact laptop with colour DSTN, cdrom and floppy.

Your advice is much appreciated. Thanks

If you only have one hard drive then, in my opinion, you need just two partitions. One for swap and one for "/".

Subpartitioning on a single disk is fairly pointless.

Regards

well i would have thought that around here the concensus would be to not bother partitioning it at all. 850 would always be a squeeze without any partitions at all, and 1.3gb is still very low. just create on large partition for / and maybe a /boot partition of only 20mb. also i guess you will still want some swap, so that's just down to how much you feel you can give over, i'd guess about 65-100 is all you can really afford to spare, but if you've enough ram then you shouldn't need much anyway.

BUT.. don't install any development tools or KDE or Gnome. they will use far too much space and slow the system down an awful lot.

Yes, thats about it!
Dont bother with /boot though, its wasting precious space on 850

the swap should be fine at 100, again, it depends on your RAM.

If you have both the 850 and the 1.3 then put the 1.3 as / and the 850 as /home, and perhaps put the swap on the 850.

You will be surprised at what you can cram onto even the 850 as long as you dont put anything you dont need, you should do fine.
And it may be a good idea not to use Gnome or KDE as these will be killers of HD space

my 2p worth