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    File system for Latitude D420

    Discussion in 'Dell' started by bnw2005, Dec 6, 2006.

  1. bnw2005

    bnw2005 Notebook Enthusiast

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    I am looking at buying a Latitude D420 under the small business section. I want the D420 for the light weight and the track point. One of the selections is to pick the file systems for the disk drive. The selections are:
    None
    NTFS for all operating systems
    Fat 32 file system for all operating systems.

    What is the correct choice for me. I plan to buy after Vista is announced. I have a less than one year old E1505 Inspiron with window media. The hard drive seems to show that drive is split as follows: 47mb fat 68.2 gb NTFS 4.64GB fat32. I am confused.

    Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
     
    bnw2005, Dec 6, 2006
    #1
  2. yamla

    yamla Notebook Consultant

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    Vista has already been announced.

    As to the file systems, NTFS is by far the superior choice over FAT32. Unless you have a specific reason to use FAT32, you want to use NTFS. You may want to use FAT32 if you are dual-booting with Linux but even then, you may be better off with the Windows ext2 driver.

    Wikipedia has some good articles on these file systems. But really, unless you have reason to choose otherwise, go with NTFS.
     
    yamla, Dec 6, 2006
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  3. ZJChaser

    ZJChaser Notebook Consultant

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    I just got my D420 yesterday. If you choose none as I did it comes with a FAT32 47meg Dell partition and the OS sitting on the remaining NTFS partition. Pretty much just as I was expecting.
     
    ZJChaser, Dec 6, 2006
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  4. Paul

    Paul Mom! Hot Pockets! NBR Reviewer

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    Just choose none. This is really only an option for advanced users that need compatibility and therefore need a FAT32 system. NTFS is far better than FAT32, so that's what you want.
     
    Paul, Dec 6, 2006
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