I’ve recently seen a few customers with fairly new Acer computers (both laptops and desktop computers). The odd thing is that they all seem to use the FAT32 filesystem.

With one particular customer, when I started the laptop, it proceeded to perform a filesystem check (which I didn’t interrupt, as it usually takes around 5 minutes)… Well after 20 minutes, the FS check finally completed, and I was able to “start work”.

Its very frustrating, when I know that if the HDD had been using NTFS, there would probably not have been a filesystem check (or at least a much quicker one).

A quick search on the internet shows that some people believe that FAT32 is faster than NTFS… that might be so, but with the speed of todays systems, I doubt that anyone can notice the difference.

Given the reliability of NTFS and how quick it is to convert (just type convert c: /fs:ntfs)… usually around 10 minutes. I just cannot understand why FAT32 is used anymore (especially by a large company like Acer!).