|  | Planning an Installation of Microsoft Windows XP Professional Choosing the Appropriate File System: FAT, FAT32, NTFS
| NTFS NTFS is the recommended file system for Windows XP Professional because it provides a higher level of security and enables file compression. Use NTFS for partitions that require: File and folder level security. You can control access to files and folders. File compression. You can compress files to create more storage space. Disk quotas. You can control disk usage on a per-user basis. File encryption. You can transparently encrypt file data. Windows XP Professional, Windows 2000, and Windows NT are the only Microsoft operating systems that you can use to gain access to data on a local hard disk that is formatted with NTFS. If you plan to gain access to files that are on a local Windows XP Professional partition with the Microsoft Windows 95 or Windows 98 operating systems, you should format the partition with a FAT or FAT32 file system.