GParted, yep, it's as cool as it sounds.

Some new PC's come with a hard drive that is split into 2 or 3 partitions, which in this day of music and video downloads galore, can be an inefficient hassle. One partition is usually the factory restore, which is never larger than 10 gb and worth keeping just in case, then the remaining 2 are usually split relatively equal.

The idea behind the partitions is for data protection in case of corruption or infection of the OS partition, keeping it separate from personal files. But having to install programs to point to a separate partition can be a pain for both noobs and nerds alike. I say, just do a good job keeping your computer up to date and clean from both bloatware and viruses, then file corruption wont be a danger. I personally have never had an issue losing files from virus corruption, because I'm not dumb enough to use a browser without AdBlock running, or naive and sick enough to click a video on Facebook labeled something like "girl kills herself on webcam" or the like.

Now, how do we reclaim this "data" partition on our own without completely redoing the system? Enter GParted or Gnome Partition Editor. With an expansive and impressive feature set and capabilities rivaling any other paid app, and even more powerful than the hallowed Disk Utility of the Mac OS. It will work on almost any kind of storage you can throw at it, regardless of file system. It can be downloaded as an app in a Linux OS from their app stores, such as in the Ubuntu Software Center. But for those not having an extra computer running Ubuntu, there is the Live CD version, that can be easily launched on the PC you want to extend the hard drive partitions into one large one, or to be used to edit external drives and the like.

One huge plus I've found found, was I can do more than a virtual partition, but an actual "physical" partition by cylinder, and not just by MB size. This proved to be invaluable to me, as it was the only way I could get both Mac and PC compatible partition onto one 16GB USB thumb drive, containing two Mac OS extended drives. One at the front of the drive structure with a bootable OSX 10.6 and the other with standard mac apps I put on machines, and then a good ol' FAT32 formatted on with PC apps, installers, scanners, cleaners, registry fixes, etc..... I set up the structure using GParted and then formatted the two Mac partitions on a Mac as those file systems are proprietary.

As with many other open source/Linux software, it's free and has a digital butt-load of how-to's. Of course all progams have their limitations, and GParted is no exception, but luckily with its awesomeness combined with the good disk managers in both modern OS's of OSX and Win7, there shouldn't be anything you can't handle.