Dual-monitor, dual-hard drive computer

[Jordan]

24 hours ago, I was in a bit of a PC predicament. The PC I was using was dead, with no power coming through when plugged in (a friend took a look at it last night and figured out that the motherboard was shot). I had another old PC that I wasn't using, but that one seemed a bit beat up (broken CD/DVD drive and perhaps a couple of other issues).

But my friend had a stroke of genius (I suppose those that are knowledgeable in PC repair, IT, etc. just call this an "idea"): create a PC Frankenstein's creature by taking the hard drive, CD/DVD drive and RAM from the dead computer and sticking it into the old one.

We plugged in both monitors, and in just a few minutes I went from having no working computer to having a working dual-monitor, dual-hard drive PC.

2.2 GHZ AMD Athlon processor

1.43 GB RAM

Hard drive #1 about 150 GB (143 GB in C drive + 6 GB in D ["Recovery"] drive)

Hard drive #2 about 185 GB (50 GB in E, 135 GB in F)

Windows XP

It's OK--by the specs you can tell it's not exactly a gamer's holy grail, but I'm not a gamer and what I've got is probably more than I really need (but for some reason, two monitors makes me feel awesome). Downloading music and streaming video online are probably my two biggest memory-eating tasks. But I've got a few stupid questions...

How should I organize my files, programs etc.? Some of the programs I have on my E/F drives overlap with those on my C drive. Where should I keep my program files? I think the F drive will wind up being just a place where I can dump and store all my music files.

What are some things I should/shouldn't do so that I don't cause any conflicts in my system/don't f**k my PC up entirely?

What are some tips/tricks/ideas that can help me get the most out of this? I've already figured out that I can watch videos and display apps on one monitor while typing on FT on the other. Apparently, having dual monitors makes people more "productive." It'll probably have the opposite effect on me.

[lavrentis]

So in your second hard drive it has been partitioned. I'm assuming that this is a SATA drive as you havn't needed to mess about with the Master jumpers. Your second hard drive is your secondary hard drive, all this is now is for storage If you really want to clean stuff up you could delete one of the partitions so that it shows up as 1 drive in My computer but that isnt really necessary. In this second drive you could delete things in your system 32 folder and it would still work but I wouldn't recommend that just incase you ever need to use it as your primary hard drive incase your first one fucks up. You can still use your programs off your secondary hard drive but you would probably have to create new shortcuts to them.

Personally I have 2 hard drives inside of mine and I just left everything as they were. I don't really use my second hard drive much and you know when its being used because its a loud ****er. If your worrying about conflictions between the two, you shouldn't worry too much, your main drive is being booted, the operating system is being loaded off of that, Add/Remove Programs should only show your installed programs of your primary hard drive.

I would leave things as they are but If you really want to clean things up, take all of the photos and music and put them onto your main hard drive in the folders in my documents, install the programs from the secondary hard drive into the primary if you want to. Then download a partition software to join your E and F drive together creating 1 folder for your second hard drive viewed in My computer. This is pretty time consuming and pretty scary to do at first. I left everything as it was.

I've also got dual monitors, its quite cool but its quite annoying sometimes as If I was to have GTA4 running in my first monitor and Firefox open in my other monitor, If I was to click Firefox, GTA4 would minimize and sometimes it doesn't like that . Other games you have to set it up a while if you want to use both monitors like Flight Sim, its quite a pain in the arse if you want to have different windows on different monitors but as you said you don't game on it, this doesn't really apply to you. It is pretty cool though when you have Firefox open up in 1 monitor and MSN or Media player in the next, definitely easier to look at rather than clicking to bring it up and its also pretty cool when you have Word and Firefox up.

So, you should be able to leave everything as it is and still be running alright.