max no of partitions.?

hi everybody. i just just want to ask that how many partition could i make in window 7. i just bought dell inspiron n5050. i t shows that only 4 partitions can be made. but i want to make 5-6 partitions on my HDD which is of 500 gb. i want separate partitions for my music , software, data, videos etc. juist like io have on my desktop with window 7.. is it posssible to do so. does partitioning is diffrent on laptops than desktops.. plz help me.

The max number of primary partitions are 4. However if you set one of the primary partitions to an Extended partition, you can create many more logical partitions within the Extended partition. The main difference between logical and primary partitions, is the fact that you can only boot to a primary partition. If you need more than 4 partitions because you want to boot to more than one OS, you would need two drives to support more than 4 primary partitions. However with that said, using a boot manager on the primary partition, you can redirect the booting process from the primary partition to a logical partition that contains an installed OS.