You can not beat an HP/PC and yes you do get Free tech support for life,24/7 online like a chat, it's great! I bought 2 new HP/PC's one big desktop, got a great deal at Office Depot, and it's a new quad core, 6MB RAM, and can be taken up to 16 MB RAM, came with a beautiful 21.5" LCD HD monitor, the price was great, also new 17" HP laptop, 4 GB RAM awesome resolution on screen, at Walmart it's the latest from HP also.. first thing I do is get rid of all trial offers installed like Norton,Office etc. then load AVG2011 and malewarebytes, windows firewall is installed of course, and defender comes in W7, which many people do not know about, and it's great..(both pc have huge HD's too)

I just had to do this on my new HP with Win 8.1. The documentation wasn't as helpful as I expected. It seemed reasonable that the backup routine could have told me exactly how much space I would need, but it didn't. Gee thanks! It turned out to require something like 19 gig. 19 is bigger than 16 (duh), so if you use a memory stick, you would require a 32 gig unit. With dvd discs, you would need four discs. If you attempted to use cd discs, you would need perhaps five times more discs. No one would want to do that. Since you have a new HP, I assume you have HP Support Assistant. It has a section with a Backup instruction and routine to actually perform the backup.

I am using DVD+R to reuse one I have, looking in my physical file I see I have 5 new ones that don't need to be erased. Still I wonder. I purchased these back in 2007, progress may have left them behind. The label is: DVD RW, DVD+R I should be able to read and write, hum, doesn't say erasable. The mfg is Memorex and proudly proclaims: Recordable, Enregistrable and Grabable the last two of which I have no clue to the meaning. I think I may have purchased them for use in a DVD audio/video recorder.. but that is digital too. I am pretty sure I can stick in my DVD player/recorder (not on the computer) and erase/overwrite..not sure I want to got to the trouble to check. Thanks for the link to third party DVD software. I'll look there but most likely will just use a new DVD. It lists a 4.7 GByte capacity. Does newer technology hold more? I think the Toshiba script talked about 4.7 GByte (may be the standard still) and two DVDs.

More memory is good but at some point there is a diminishing return on the investment and that point is a function of what you are doing with your computer. Things like first person shooter games, video editing, photo editing (of very large files) all benefit from lots of memory. Writing an email to Aunt Betty doesn't require very much memory at all because the computer can process information far faster than you can type. Same thing for the Internet, your computer can render pages faster than your connection can supply the information. So if you have a slow internet connection, you're not likely to experience much, if any improvement. With that said, 4 gigs is probably a pretty good number. If you really want a WOW factor, get a solid state drive and use that for your O/S and critical applications. To try and answer some of your questions: - Windows doesn't care about the physical drive or any logical partitions. It does make good sense to install Windows 7 on the newer, faster drive. You'll get the best performance that way. When it comes time to get rid of XP, everything will be on one drive and that, if nothing else, should help you keep things mentally organized. - My understanding is that you have two physical drives, one with a functioning version of XP and the other blank. If that is not correct, say so NOW. - When you go to install Windows 7, it will recognize that there is another operating system (Windows XP) already installed. Windows 7 won't do anything to XP other than to set up the dual boot. Essentially it's computer language that says, "XP is there, Windows 7 is here, which one do you want to use?" - Logical partitions to a drive a largely a function of personal preference. Understand that it is more difficult (but not impossible) to non-destructively repartition a drive after you put data on it. If you, for example, have a partition for music, another for videos, and a third for pictures and find down the road that you have a lot more videos than music, it becomes more difficult to rearrange things. My suggestion is a single, large partition and use folders to organize your data.