So, if I understand this correctly, if you do a clean XP install, the recovery partition is unaffected and remains as your failsafe back up. But then why bother creating recovery disks? Is that just in case you have to replace the entire hard drive?

How can you tell if you have the UltraLight screen?

Ok then, constructive comments: The recovery partition generally takes "a few GB"... I would highly recommend keeping this partition around. It's a nice little safety net that can really come in handy if for some reason you need to get up and running ASAP... But it won't help you if the drive fails...

Eactly. A lot of extraneous junk that I'd like to remove.

I purchased a new X60S when they had the Verizon $1599 special last month, plus an extra gig of RAM for just $99. Can't beat that. It's my first Thinkpad, and many thanks to all of you for your invaluable insights that helped me in the selection process. Anyway, it just came in and my newbie questio...

Good advice from you guys. Thanks!

Newbie, here! This forum is proving invaluable and I've settled on a Thinkpad X32 as the best price/performance compromise (though I confess that I'd be all over the sleeker X41 despite the premium price if not for the slow hard drive and resulting slow Windows XP start up). So, my thinking is get t...