My father purchased a New lenovo 3000 N500 lap top for me yesterday. I would like to have a mninmum opf an eighty gigabyte partition for windows so that I acn run my prplogic Comptia netplus and A + Depot Technician test preparation software ( windows only unfortunately}.

Three questions

1. Should i do away with the included vista restore partition?

2. With 166GB of hard drive space left after the 80gb ntfs and 4gb swap partitions, what would the the ideal devision of the remaining 166gb between the / and /home partitions with the home partition occupying the lions share of the remaining disk space?

I recommend you create the recovery disks in Vista, go to start menu, type 'recovery' and select 'Recovery Disk Creation', go through that process, and then you can do what you want with your PC, you can completely wipe everything, and still re-install Vista if needs be, at a later date. After that, it's up to you how you partition your HDD, I would suggest a minimum of 10 - 15GB of space for / and the rest for /home.

Are you looking to dual boot with XP? Your post is not very clear. If you do, install XP first, and Open SUSE after.

PS: Make sure and put those recovery disks in a safe place!

Yes indeed

Update Vista with Service Pack 1 and whatever else Windows Update delivers for proposals and make the recovery disks. The recovery partition doesn't take that much space, and if you are to use Vista, is Vistas preferred manner to restore itself. I would say to leave it.

You can dual boot with linux. If you do, you will avoid problems with Vista by using Vistas own partitioning tool to resize and make unformatted space for linux. You might also look to see if the recovery partition is visible, and for its location, that is from which cylinder to which cylinder, in case it doesn't show up during your linux installation.

I like to use a Parted Magic live-cd to take a look and use the command fdisk -l in its terminal program to check and control what I have before starting to install. I take notes. Good Luck

Tahnks for your advice I will plan on updating vista and making the aforementioned recovery cds.

Yes I am looking to duel boot XP and OpenSuse 11.1, because my prepe logic practice test software requires windows XP to run.

Well, before you go and get rid of Vista, try and download all the drivers you will need in XP, and that includes the SATA drivers for your mobo.

I was doing some reading up, it's not a trivial exercise to downgrade to XP apparently. Would you consider running a copy of XP in a VirtualBox in OpenSUSE? Works for me...