is a backup partition necessary?

a coworker brought in her laptop that was running painfully slowly. it's a compaq presario with an upgrade of windows me on it and a 4 GB harddrive. it has a 1+ GB C: drive and a 2+ GB D: SYSTEM_SAVE drive with everything mirrored as backup. both drives are about 3/4 full. i speeded things up a lot by removing much of the crap from start-up, but am still wondering if there's any reason we shouldn't delete that backup drive. can we just dump everything off it, or will it automatically back up anything put onto the C: drive? she doesn't remember intentionally putting anything onto the D: partition. the laptop is part of her home network and she has backed up important files on her other computer. thanks,
~melias

 

Hi, The D: or system save partition is particular to the Compaq install Cds- you cannot restore from the disks (if the laptop came with any) if you remove that partition...and, ..if you do not have disks to restore from....you may very well need that partition!!WinME also uses what is known as System Restore, as you probably know...this feature can be turned off, which may result in a better performance, coupled with what you are doing- pruning down Startups. You can find info on the Compaq Restore partition at the Compaq support area. Win ME Help screen has link to read about turning off ME's System Restore feature.
If by accident the Sys Save partition is damated or fdisked....there is a way to reinstall it, available from Compaq.
Of course, you can format the hard drive, which removes all data....and reinstall some version of Windows, same as any pc.
The critical thing is the Restore Cds....they wont work without the automatically created extra partition.
EDIT+ went back and reread- was the ME upgrade bought through Compaq?
Here is the main support page- from this, you can find relevant info. http://www.compaq.com/athome/support/