Sorry. Always have a backup first. You can use something free like Clonezilla to make a backup outside of Windows of the whole partition or disk. Then use Parted Magic outside of Windows to resize the partition.

I just assumed W7 could do it itself, but I guess that isn't possible until W42. Just use Linux, even for NTFS partitions it is better.

Did you use Device Manager on your XP machine when you tried shrinking it? XP is very, very old stuff. Better to use a current build of Parted Magic than deal with anything built-in to XP.

Mike

Oh yeah, after decompressing the drive I went back and recompressed just the old contract scid data files and the data folder went from 62.7 to 13.7 gigs. I don't access them very often, so it shouldn't have much negative effect on my ssd, if hardly any. After each rollover I'll just compress the previous contracts. After all the changes, I have right around 50 gigs free space, which even at a conservative 4/1 compression ratio, that gives me about 200 gigs of free space for scid data, which is more than I will ever need. Thanks again for you help.

I would say i7 over Xeon. My overclocked i7 @ 5.0ghz on water runs 24/7, never had a single issue. If you don't overclock then even more so (my overclock is also an undervolt on idle, to help with overall life).

In either case, throw out the stock CPU cooler and buy a quality HSF (heat sink + fan). You can find good reviews on newegg for this, it will cost around $50 or so.

16GB memory

SSD, or two SSD's in a RAID 1 unless you have a good daily backup plan, and don't mind down time should one fail and you need to restore the system. I have 2x256GB SSD in raid 0, but if doing it again, would do raid 1 even though I have a daily image backup. This is simply because of the time lost should a drive fail, I don't want to deal with that.

Also check carefully how much space you really need for this. Ideally try to leave 50% of your SSD empty for maximum performance. So it means you might really need a 512GB SSD, or two in RAID 1, depending.

Definitely don't do the i5 on a new purchase. The very minimal cost savings is not worth it, go for the i7. This is more future proofing than anything you "need" today. Unless you are backtesting, and then you "need" it.

Mike