Daughter has a cheap acer laptop with a 40 gig hard drive. This seems to be partitioned into two 20 gig drives with virtualy nothing on the D half. Her C drive is full and the computer has slowed down to snails pace. Anything she can do to get more space from D into C. Why has acer set it up this way?

Probably originaly it was a restore partition with an image of the first one on it, there are free partition tools out there that will allow you to combine the two but make sure you back up first, its generally quite safe but murphys law applies!
Try this:

http://partitionlogic.org.uk/download/index.html

Mac

As suggested combining the two is a good way to do it (bearing the warnings in mind though )
Another possibility, if not already done, is to relocate the page file to the second partition, that can free up a fair bit of space?
Also cleaning up your temp folders (including internet temp) can help.

Cheers

Alex

Drag files from C drive into D ?

20Gb is too big for a retsore partition and any case restore partition are always hidden.

Better to shrink the partition d: is on and expand the c: partition using Partition Magic or similar.

Other things you can do are move the swap file to d:, and move the "my documents" folder to d:

Also create a "Program Files Directory and install any new program to there.

if she uses a certain dir to store stuff in you can if using win2000 and up mount the partition as a dir on the other partition, you can do this in the disk manager admin panel

Gav, I haven't got a clue what you are talking about. Sorry. Using XP home.
I have heard of a page file and a swop file but don't know what they are either. Would the computer know where things were if I moved them to D?
I understand shrink a partition and grow the other one. What I would like is to make C 35gig and D 5gig. Is that possible and is partition magic the best program to use.? Will PC World have it.