Partitioning HD's

I just bought an 80 GB (77)and wanted some advice on maximizing the drive through partitioning. I was thinking:
15 GB - windows & Swap file, 10 GB - Documents, 15 GB - Programs, 30 GB Music/graphics, and 7 GB Temp.
What are your thoughts?

I can't help much if you are trying to minimize the amount of space spent in the drive formatting itself, but I can say from experience that you probably won't like having that many partitions as much as you think you would. It sounds all nice and organized, but when it comes down to it one of those will fill up faster than the others, and you will wish you could resize them all, and that resizing will be really rough and probably require a second drive to back everything up to while you reformat and repartition everything. You'll probably just end up with each partition having a little bit of everything. (At least that's what happened to me when I tried it.)

Instead, how about one partition for documents and all your stuff, and one for all of your "temporaries" such as the OS install and your games and programs? Backing up is simple: just copy everything in the second partition. Reinstalling is simple, you don't have to back anything up to reformat the first partition, because everything has to be reinstalled anyway.

I can also say that if you have some cash, it's often really nice to have two hard drives, and you can organize stuff that way too. It just saves you a lot of pain if you ever have to back up, reinstall, or move data around. I've even heard of people keeping a disk image of a fresh install of windows + updates and drivers, and periodically wiping their OS and restoring the image to get a perfectly clean install in five minutes.

I agree. A single partition for OS + programs, and one for data. 15/65 is a good split.

Some day I'll be rich and famous for inventing a device that allows you to stab people in the face over the internet.