it uses FAT, however the new ones use NTFS
Active partition is a term Windows uses to mean the partition Windows will boot off of. The Windows boot loader goes to its configuration file and starts, these files will be in the active partition.
It uses the swap. The swap is a dedicated partition and not a file.
All hard drives must have at least one partition to be usable by an operating system, even if the partition uses the entire drive. If you are installing an operating dissimilar from the one you are using currently (ie. Windows XP and FreeBSD), you should partition the disk from that system's installer, not in Windows.
Yes you can ! My Windows 7 laptop came with it's 232 GB hard-drive equally split into two partitions. One has Windows on it, the other is the recovery partition. However - the recovery data uses less than 8GB of the space - so I moved the partition with the aid of Ease-US software (see related link). I didn't need to do extensive back-ups or re-load any software. It moved the partition seamlessly and safely - I now have a 200GB partition for use with Windows 7.
Yes. NTFS, the file system that Windows XP uses, has a maximum partition size of 16 TB.
Ubuntu uses many file formats, many of which are shared with Windows and Macintosh. The partition format the Ubuntu generally uses is an ext4 filesystem.
Most operating systems uses the boot partition to boot the computer. In some operating systems, both the system partition and the boot partition are used to boot up the system.
All modern operating systems implement what is called "virtual memory", where unused parts of an application are swapped out and placed on the hard drive. Windows does this by creating a swapfile on bootup and then resizing it as needed. The problem with this is that resizing it constantly will cause the file system to become fragmented. Linux typically uses a dedicated partition for swapping instead of a swapfile.While the partition is a fixed size and may take up more space than the Windows swapfile at any given moment, it helps prevent the file system from becoming fragmented and is usually faster.
There's no such thing as Windows XP format or Windows Vista format. You should check however if your external hard drive uses an NTFS or FAT32 partition table. You can see that by right-clicking the drive (C, D, E, ..) and clicking properties. If it uses NTFS it will be no problem for Vista. If it's FAT32, then google for a way to convert it to NTFS. No big deal.
describe how Windows Media Player uses visualizations
Windows prevents successful boot and logon from updating Last Known Good Configuration and Windows XP uses the minimum set of drivers and services to start the GUI
The following table shows the default values that Windows XP uses for NTFS formatting. Drive size(logical volume) Cluster size Sectors----------------------------------------------------------512 MB or less 512 bytes 1513 MB - 1,024 MB (1 GB) 1,024 bytes (1 KB) 21,025 MB - 2,048 MB (2 GB) 2,048 bytes (2 KB) 42,049 MB and larger 4,096 bytes (4 KB) 8The maximum default cluster size under Windows XP is 4 kilobytes (KB) because NTFS file compression is not possible on drives with a larger allocation size. The Format utility never uses clusters that are larger than 4 KB unless you specifically override that default either by using the /A: option for command-line formatting or by specifying a larger cluster size in the Format dialog box in Disk Management.If you use the Convert utility to convert a volume from FAT to NTFS, Windows always uses a 512-byte cluster size. FAT structures are aligned on 512-byte boundaries; a larger cluster size does not allow conversion. Note also that in Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 and earlier, when a partition is formatted under Windows Setup, the partition is first formatted as FAT and then converted to NTFS. Therefore the cluster size is always 512 bytes when a partition is formatted in Setup. (This information does not apply to Microsoft Windows 2000 Setup or Windows XP Setup, which both format the partition according to your choice of a file system.)