Q. I have a Micron PC with Windows 98 SE. My drives were divided into C: and D:.

When programs have been installed over the years they have gone into the C: space.

As a result, I have a ton of open space on my D: drive and not much room left on the C: drive.

William Roop comcast.net

A. You can fix things either by uninstalling and then reinstalling programs or by acquiring drive-partitioning software to change the balance by making D: smaller and C: larger.

If you are fortunate enough to have all of the original CDs for your software, all you need to do is reinstall it and pick D: instead of C: as the directory for the program.

Most folks probably don’t particularly notice, but the installation software for most programs includes a screen-showing that the software is going to be saved on the C: drive in a named directory.

There is a Browse button here that can be used to point it to the D: drive instead.

You probably will need to uninstall a program before the installation software will run, because a lot of installation routines won’t continue if they find a version of the software still on the computer.

To add or remove software, use the Add/Remove Programs Control Panel that comes up as an option when the Start button is clicked.

A far tidier but somewhat costly fix is to get partitioning software.

I use Partition Commander from V Communications Inc. (www.v-com.com; be sure to use that hyphen). It costs $50 and comes in separate versions for XP/ME/2000 and for 95/NT and for DOS.

Another excellent choice is Norton PartitionMagic 8.0 from Symantec, at $70.

Jim Coates writes for the Chicago Tribune.

Q. To get to the spyware repair site that I need to use, you must start the address with a tilde. How do you create one on the computer keyboard?

Richard J. Ross comcast.net

A. I recommend holding down the Shift key and then tapping the tilde key ((TILDE)), which is located on the key next to the numeral 1 just above the alphabet on standard keyboards.

You are far from alone in this confusing situation, Mr. R.

The tilde amounts to a punctuation mark that is used commonly in languages including Spanish and Portuguese, but hardly ever employed in English. When it is used in an English expression, like “Coates is (TILDE)correct,” it would mean that the statement is approximate rather than certain. People in the sciences use it, as do mathematicians, to connote things like (TILDE)10 grams or (TILDE)750 milliliters.

Precisely because it is as rare as a (TILDE)hen’s tooth, the tilde was adopted by the writers of the original Unix hypertext markup language that creates Web sites as a way to reserve part of a larger site to a subgroup.

Many Internet service providers used the tilde to designate a customer’s private site, as in www.serviceprovider.com/(TILDE)johndoe. And too many Web authors use it in the address of subheadings on sites designed for the general public, creating no end of confusion.

(Contact Jim Coates via e-mail at jcoatestribune.com or via snail mail at the Chicago Tribune, Room 400, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago IL 60611. Questions can be answered only through this column. Add your point of view at www.chicagotribune.com/askjim.)

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AP-NY-07-14-04 0628EDT