Partitions are a big pain in the butt. I wouldn't do that. It's one thing if you have two physical drives, but if it's just one drive with one set of heads, it's not worth it. As far as swap files go, the remedy is to have a huge hard drive, 20GB or more and a lot of memory.
I'd like to hear more as to what Windows version he is using. If it's 95 or 98, I would suggest that he use a boot disk with FDISK and FORMAT on it to format the hard drive, as well as the drivers necessary to access his CD-ROM. Then, he should create a directory called WINSETUP or something and copy everything on the CD to that directory. He should then reboot and run setup from that directory.
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351W 89 Mustang GT Convertible