There are partition size limits, and your new drive exceeds these limits for some formats. Did you first format the drive? Your earlier drives may have be pre-formatted. If the new 160 GB drive has been formatted as one partition, it is either formmated as a NTFS drive or used special extentions for a FAT32 drive. You will loose this special formatting if you format the drive again as a FAT32 system. Refer to instructions that came with the drive. If the drive has not been formatted, then you can not write to it until it is formatted. NTFS or FAT32 ? NTFS provides greater partitions and more reliable disk operation. NTFS uses log files to keep track of all disk activity. Win XP can use this journal to repair files after a system crash. Windows 95, 98, ME can not recognize NTFS volumes. You need a FAT32 volume as the boot volume for these operating systems. This restriction does not apply to files on a network. The boot record must be on a FAT32 partition for these earlier Windows sytems. On partitions greater than 8 GB, NTFS manages the space more efficiently than FAT32. The maximum partition size for a FAT32 drive created by Widows XP is 32 GB; A single NTFS volume can be up to 16 terabytes (16,384 GB) using default settings. The Fdisk utility in Windows 98/ME can make a partition greater than 32 GB on a FAT32 disk. Use a bootup disk from one of these two systems to do this. After formatting the extra large partition, Win XP can use it. The main reason for using FAT32 is compatiblity to the older system and/or software. If you are constructing a multi-boot system and one of these sytems is the older Windows system, the FAT32 system is needed for the older version of Windows. If you have only Windows XP or Vista, I recommend NTFS. Its a good idea to scan a new disk for bad sectors before using. Presumably, the manufacturer has already scanned and marked off the bad sectors, but I did have one 80 GB external disk where this had not been done. It gave me trouble until a complete scan was performed. A few bad sectors were found and marked off. After that, the disk performed flawlessly. So first, format the disk and then scan for bad sectors. This will take some time for a 160 GB disk, but it well worth the effort. If the disk is already formatted and is what you want, scan it before using. With a disk of 160 MB, I suggest that you break this into 2 partitions of approximately 80 GB each. The partitions will not be quite as large as 80 GB because part of the space is used for file management and directories. Put the operating system on the first partition and use the second for data. The next question: Do you at any time have two hard drives connected to the computer? If so, the hard drive with the operating system must have its jumper set to "master" and the other disk to "slave" (assuming that both drives are connected to the same cable). While setting up a new drive using the existing computer, you may find it necessary to switch the jumpers a few times depending on the job at hand. Hopefully, your computer's BIOS is capable of auto-recognizing the hard drives and can make settings accordingly, else this has to be done manually. Please let us know if any of this information was useful.

Thanks to bpgreen and Raven, I am now sitting here with my beautiful laptop dream machine! Yep! I am up and running fine now. My server must have been working on their end or the weather caused me to get knocked off so much when I first tried being on the net with that external modem. I thought it was the modem but it is working fine! "LUV" ya all for help making my dream come true. Seeing I am not getting knocked off, I DL'd some programs which only got half done before when getting knocked off. Audacity for one. Got my spyware and virus programs from my flashdrive. Now for the goodies, huh? Bless you all. I have to get to bed now. This is the latest being up on the puter for me! Can't blame me for basking in no disconnects. "LOL" Good night. Hugs, Urlee PS: Sorry you all can't see this beautiful laptop. LOVE the fact I can ZOOM to make the fonts larger for reading and typing just by using the % drop down on the bottom right on Windows 7 here.

Snidely - good point about not removing things if they're not causing trouble - lest they turn out to have been needed. So I have left some things that I have no idea about. I did delete Dell Stage - bc. it's a real pain - gets in the way all the time (my daughter who's had this on her laptop for 2 years confirmed that it's just in the way). I did all the microsoft updates, ran a few antivirus, got rid of what I want to get rid of, and it's mostly good to go. Here's the trouble that remains: I can't get the printer working. It's a Canon Pixma MX850 - on the home network. I did not want to install the Canon disk bc. it has a ton of it's own bloatware. So I went to Canon and downloaded the driver - as well as the IJ utility software (I think that helps the computer find a printer on the network). Went to devices and printers, added the printer and made it the default printer. It shows up in printers and devices, but when I go to print something, it fails. Troubleshooting says the test page didn't print bc. something else is in the queue. But there is nothing else in the queue. I opened the queue from my pain desktop (that's connected to the printer) - and there's no documents in the queue. Went to the printer queue on DH's lapto; - it also shows nothing in the queue. I can print from other computers. Don't know what else to do. And I just remembered that I did not see Java. It didnt come up as needing updating when I ran the Secunia scan. I am not sure which programs need it, but can imagine my husband being stumped if he tries to do something that needs Java and asks him to install. I'd like to install it for him. Got to remember that. I also have a question about Microsoft Security Essentials. Twice now it found something bad - and I selected to remove the couple of files. Does this AV just run in the background or do I also need to run scans? Thank you. Lynn.

Yes, Google Chrome is a browser. No, you do not have to make it your default browser to use it. Just click on the icon for Chrome to open it, same as you do for IE. But you can have whichever one you want as your default and still use either one.