Well, since you brought up Partitioning, what's the best way to do that these days? If you have a 40 gig drive, is 4 10's a good way to go? Or make the OS drive only like a gig or 2 and then have other drives for game installs and such? Not sure that it makes a huge difference, but it can't hurt.
First off, unless you're apart of a W2K network only (that includes XP) and it's necessary to use NTFS then I'd stick with FAT32. This is a good idea especially if you have some Wintendo (W95, W98) machines around and a part of your network. If it's a stand alone machine (only 1 machine in your house) then NTFS would be ok, but you can run into issues trying to fix the machine if it crashes (i.e. can't boot to DOS because of NTFS). There are tools to fix issues, but if you're not familiar with them, there's a learning curve.
That being said, I like to make a primary partition (about 4 gigs) for the OS and a logical partition for data (the rest of the drive). You certainly can make another small logical drive for a swap file. I install the OS to the primary and all programs to the logical partition. Once that's all done, I make a ghost image of the primary. The advantage of doing this ensure's that if your OS craps out on you and you have to re-install, all your data is safe on the logical partition . You just need to re-install the programs to the same logical partition again (unless you have a ghost image). I also back up my logical partition to a separate hard drive and leave the ghost images there in case my active hard drive fails. I've lost data 2 times if I recall correctly and using this method pretty much insures that won't happen again.
I've had 2 friends that never backed up there stuff and thought Ghost software wasn't necessary, and after they both crashed their machines and lost all data, they converted to the backup philosophy quickly. Needless to say they like this method which I learned from my bro.
I'm certainly curious to hear about other ways to set up drives if anyone wants to share.