I am always amazed when people say they have loads of photos or music that they do not want to lose or cannot replace yet have never backed up these valuables. If your hard drive fails tomorrow you have a very real problem. You are not alone in this and I am not trying to be mean spirited but if you fail to look after you and your possessions then who will? For less than $50 you can buy a name brand DVD-RW and for under $20 you can buy 100 blank DVDs. You can buy a lesser amount of blanks of course, that is a choice you can make. The DVD will come with software you install to use it. Or if you already have blank CDs you could use those in the DVD burner. If you back some of that stuff up and remove it from this computer it may well run faster because you will have more free space on the hard drive for the swap file to work better. Does your activity light come on frequently and stay on for long periods? If so this is an indication the swap file is have a problem. Then if you really want to get carried away you can visit Big Lots where they have (or did recently in the Buffalo, NY store) CD or DVD labels and the software to create your own labels for $10 or $11. Another option would be to install this hard drive as a slave in the new computer you intend to buy. You would need to check that there are compatible data connections in the new computer. Older hard drives are IDE or ATA but the newer and faster technology is SATA.

On ebay you can find a device I like called a disk drive 'rack' or carrier. You put it in like a floppy drive, on the other 1/2 you put in any disk drive. Then you can plug in the disk like a floppy and run it anytime you want to look at the drive. This could be something for $14 that would help you to move files from old , hard drive, to a new one $60 for 750gb on amazon. JDMADERA has the disk racks for serial (SATA or parallel) or you can use an external hard drive, or any drive with an external adapter $14. I personally like the reasoning of buying a new drive to put all my files on it. I get a new drive, I copy my old files and test the new drive for a while before I commit to it , and have the chance to sell my old drive while having a backup. Another idea: If many files are text based then zip or RAR them and mail them to yourself. Many mail sites accept 2mb up to 20mb mail attachments. That might handle most of your documents and that way you have them backed up. It's a secondary backup.. you should still have them somewhere else but one site I use has been good to me for 5 years, for free, holding 40mb of stuff. I apoligize if I didn't answer your Q excactly. I'm in a hurry and tried to offer what I could to what I thought I saw in your post.. in a 30 second quick read. Andre

Please disregard my question. I was able to answer my own question. Turbotax will do this at no cost because of the income & the fact that both OR & AZ participate. Guess the fee described is for multiple states IF one of the states doesn't participate. At any rate, the taxes were filed at no cost. Thanks.

Like Holly, I began with our county GIS maps and aerial photographs, Google Earth, and imported them into Illustrator to give the county proposed placement of the house, driveway access, distances to property lines and resources (we're on a forestry deferral), and for my own landscaping design and barn/corral fence placement. (Ask me how fun this all is on a heavily forested property – thank goodness for Google Earth's historical views) However, Illustrator is professional design software with a very steep learning curve unless you are already experienced using it (I've used it for over 25 years in my design/illustration business). It is also expensive, so you probably wouldn't want to buy it just for this single purpose. You might do better using Photoshop, which is a bit more intuitive, although the drawing tools and layers have their own difficulties. The GIS maps included measurements for property lines and topographical markings (we're on a hillside, and this allowed me to show that our driveway met county restrictions). I also used their on-line measuring tools to give distances to property lines, since physically measuring would have meant rappelling into the ravine that marks one property edge. As is typical in my life, I presented the building department with a thorough, accurate rendering of our four acres with existing structures, driveway and road access, septic system, well, power lines, etc., etc., and they laughed and said they normally received chicken scratch drawings with no pretense of scale.