How to Manage Storage in Windows Vista

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Dave Andrews and today I'm going to show you how to manage storage in Windows Vista. On our hard drive, you can break it up into multiple partitions. Usually we're using a C drive, a D drive and an E drive. These can all come from one hard drive and can be broken up into partitions by using Vista's computer, that storage manager. I'm going to show you how to pull that up. In Vista, let's click on the start button which is this round button and let's go to "Computer". Right click on "Computer" and select manage. Now will pull up the computer management interface. You can do many tasks here, but the one that we're interested in most is under the storage tab, disk management. This screen will show you all the disk that you have in your computer. I currently have two, a C and a D drive. Down here at the bottom, it shows you the physical devices. This is disk zero, which will be hard disk zero and cd-rom zero which is my single cd-rom that I have. If I'd had multiple hard drives on this computer, I would have a disk one, a disk two, a disk three and on and on and on. This shows you how these disks here physically configured into partitions which are these little blocks right here. The disk itself, covers this entire area and we broken it up into two by using these partitions. If you right click on the partition, you can select properties. That pulls up your actual information about that particular partition, such as how much spaces used, how much spaces free and also gives you tools, such as checking for errors and de-fragmenting it. To change the drive letter of a partition, right click on it and select change drive letter and paths, select the change and you pick a new drive letter from this drop down list. This tool is that easy to use. My name is Dave Andrews and I've just showed you how to manage your disk using Windows Vista."