How to delete partitions

I am a fairly new user and have purchased an Acer aspire3680 laptop. How can I delete the partition between C and D discs? (XP is pre loaded and I know nothing about the actual running of computers)

As a new computer, I assume with a single Harddrive.

The "C" drive is your actual harddisk.
The "D" drive is normally your cd/dvd drive.

There is no partition between them they are seperate drives.

Unless I am totally misunderstanding you.

Hi ferret, My Acer has a split hard drive, as I said it is partitioned into C and D drices, the dvd drive is E.

Your D partition will hold the recovery information should you need to restore to factory settings. I've created a recovery disk DVD for my compaq laptop but I'll leave the D partition incase the dvd disk gets corrupted. With the D partition I'll only need to tap F11 on boot-up to restore the laptop. Check your laptop manual regarding recovery or resetting to factory settings.

thanks for the replies, i've now made backup discs.