An often overlooked feature of Windows Vista is the ability to extend - or even shrink a partition. My regular readers will know I recently picked up a Motion LE1700, it had a 3GB recovery partition built in, as I recently installed World of WarCraft on the machine I decided I needed to generate some free space.
I don't need the recovery partition as the machine is backed up to Windows Home Server, all I have to do is plug in my Xbox 360 HD DVD drive (the only optical USB drive I have) and boot from the restore CD, or the Windows Vista DVD if I want to cleanly install.
All it took to add the 3GB to the main partition was a quick trip to Disk Management.
Best of all this didn't even require a reboot, the main partition just has an extra 3GB of space instantly.
To do this on Windows XP you'd need to buy a 3rd party piece of software and reboot the machine.