two hard drives, two many problems

[disciplejohn52]

I have two 160GB hard drives. One is designated C:, the other J:.
(D & E are DVD and CD-ROM, F thru I are card readers).
The C: drive gets filled up to fast, and the J: drive doesn't get used unless something is specifically installed on it, resulting in some things being completely installed on just the J: drive, and some on the C: drive. This seems terribly inefficient, as I can't schedule disk maintenance on both drives at the same time, plus many programs want to use C: as the default storage place, even if the program is installed on the J: drive.
I know there has been mentions on here about using one disk for programs and one for storage. I don't know how I would set that up, or even if I should.
One of our biggest space-users is video editing (and the Sims). It often comes to a standstill because of one disk or the other getting filled up.
So the question is, should I (or even can I) set the two hard drives up as one, or what do I need to do to make things work right?
I am getting ready to do a reinstall of the operating system in hopes that I can make things work right, but didn't know if that would help or not.
Operating system: XP sp2
computer make/model:Emachines T3256
RAM: 1GB
Hard drive: WD1600AAJB & WD1600BB
Only restore cd's available
I am pretty sure C: is master and J: is slave

[disciplejohn52]

addendum: the two drives show up as Master-Slave everywhere, but are in fact jumpered CS

[Carbon Dudeoxide]

Try moving all your movies, pictures and music from C Drive to the other drive.
You can also move whatever you want to the other drive, but do NOT move anything from C:\Program Files.

Here are some other tips to speed up your computer and save space:
http://www.computerhope.com/forum/index.php/topic,62253.0.html

[s-mac]

My Netbook has 2 partitions, C is 40GB and D is 70GB. I definately see what you mean, M C drive is 3/4s full while I'm using maybe 5GB on D. I would merge the partitions, but since it doesn't have a DVD drive, I'm afraid if something goes wrong I'm stuck. Guess it doesn't really matter since I don't use it that much.

I wouldn't merge the drives even if you could(can you?). I imagine it would lag.

[Carbon Dudeoxide]

I'm not very sure about this, but merging two partitions will not make the computer 'lag'.....