I am a total newbie to managing my computer. I have been a user since the late 80's but have never been at a nuts and bolts (so to speak) level.

I have recently rebuilt my computer (which colapsed one day) and went from a 32bit winXP to a 64bit vista SP1. I did some reasearch found components that were compatible, cpu, motherboard, power supply, memory, and a much larger hard drive. Everything seems to be working fine.

The question:
Why do I want more than one partition?
What stratgies for creating different partitions?

any advice or disscussion is very much appreciated, Thanks.
dp