A case of FAT being thin. Before the Windows development team guessed that users would process huge video files on their PCs, hard drives were only formatted in something called FAT (file allocation table), which, in one of its incarnations (FAT32), commonly limits file size to 4GB. WinXP uses a formatting schema called NTFS, which lets you create files as large as your hard drive will permit. To find out what file system is on any particular drive, right-click the drive name and select Properties. You can convert FAT16 or FAT32 to NTFS, but you cannot revert.

Last update: 02:09 PM Wednesday, March 8, 2006