merging primary partition with a logical one

Hi

Can Windows xp disk management merge 2 partitions, one of them is the primary partition where windows resides?

A friend's computer is having Windows installed in a very small primary partition (2.5gb) and its making everything crawl like a turtle, too slow.
I thought I try increasing the windows partition by adding another partition to it (merging) but i did not see that option available. Is that so? or is there a way to do it?

if not, is there a freeware tool available anywhere to do this?

I suppose in this sense merging could also be called removing. When you remove a partition, the space is re-allocated.

There is an option somewhere in Windows that lets you determin the size of a partition, unfortuanly I cannot remember it right now.

If you go to Control Panel --> Administrative Tools --> Computer Management --> Disk Management

You can delete the said partition and reallocate it to the primary. However if you want to merge two partitions I think you need to create a dynamic disk and span the two partitions.

For this, you need Partition Magic.
http://www.powerquest.com/partitionmagic/

As quoted above windows disk management can't join partitions together it can only delete them and create them, As Lucassix mentioned you will need Partition Magic to join the partitions without loosing your information.