Hi. I hope it's okay if I jump in on this thread as I have a similar task ahead of me. My 11 yo daughter's computer has a 40GB hard drive - which was sufficient for her playing games and surfing on the computer. Now she's starting to store music in Itunes, some picturs, an Flip Video's, so she's now over 75% full on her hard drive. Her computer is slowing way down and I've run the ccleaner, defragged the drive, run spyware programs and gotten rid of spyware. Clearly need to free up space. I could either get her an external drive and put her music, pictures and videos there. Or I could replace her internal hard drive. Replacing the internal drive sounds wise bc. she'll she might have difficulty knowing where to go for her music, videos, etc if it's not on her C: drive. But I'm worried about getting the information from her current drive to the new one. On the other hand, her computer is Dell dimension 4500 - from 2002 (I just updated to 1.5 GB Ram). These specs: XP sp3 1.8 Ghz Intel Pentium 4 processor 40GB hard drive CD-RW, DVD-rom drive (I think that means it only writes cd's but will play dvd's) I think pretty soon this will be too outdated and slow to do much of what she needs. In a year or so, it might be time to get her a new computer - in which case having her files on the external hard drive would be great - no changes needed when getting a new computer. Or I may pass mine down to her then. If I go the route of changing the internal hard drive, BP suggested above: "get a bigger hard drive, create a disk image of your current drive on the external drive, create a boot CD, put the new drive in and restore from the backup." Sounds great but I am unsure how to do those steps. If I buy her an external drive - and try to create a disk image of her current drive, I have no idea how to do that - or how to create a boot CD, or how to restore from the back-up. (I do think I can figure out physically replacing the actual drive). She certainly needs more space. Given her computer specs - and soon to be growing need to store music and video, should I just get her a large (500GB?) external hard drive - or go through the work of changing her internal hard drive? I hope it's appropriate to post this here. Let me know if I should instead start my own thread. Thank you. Lynn. PS - On my own computer, I have an external hard drive that has a back-up of my C drive - and some video files. It's a 600 GB hard drive with 136GB free. For an external hard drive that doesn't run programs, do I still need to keep 15-25% free space?

I'm not sure which you'd like to buy but I found: SD Card, SDHC Card, MultiMediaCard, MultiMediaCard Plus listed as memory card options for this camera. What I'd do is call PC CONNECTION and let them help you decide. They are a great electronics/computer catalog company in NH (no sales tax and very good prices). They have been in business since the late 1980's I think. They have great tech people who can help you with your decision. I once wanted a kind of expensive cable for my computer to hook it up to a printer and their phone rep wouldn't sell it to me! He said I could get the job done with a product that cost 1/3 the price. It was new and not yet in their catalog. I took his advice and he was right. Saved me about $150. I trust them and they have never steered me wrong. You can get their 800 number from their website. You are going to LOVE your Cannon camera. Get the most memory you can! You will be making mini movies all the time! Good luck. LENVT Here is a link that might be useful: PCconnection

Well, I'd be more worried about finding a replacement I love than getting rid of one I didn't, lol. I did buy a really nice mail order pure natural organic latex mattress that is really comfy. Firm on one side and a bit softer on the other, but neither is really soft like a memory foam or gel one is. Let me see if I can figure out the brand and will let you know. The first one they sent was an undersized queen and they promptly replaced it. The second one is better but they are not generous in their measurements. It's in a guest room and everyone seems to like it. I'll come back and post the name when I find it. eta: that was easy, it is Zenhaven. They have the Zenhaven and the Saatva hybrid; I got the Zenhaven. It is flippable, so should last almost a lifetime. The last pure latex mattress I had lasted 40 years, lol. Zenhaven

For an 8mp camera, I finally got a 2gb card and shoot RAW, you don't need quite as large a card for JPG. Still, at events, I sometimes do shoot in JPG and was filling a 1gb card in 1/2 hour, the 2gb card filled up in about an hour doing some street shots and a parade in RAW. It's best to set the camera to the finest quality possible unless they are shots where you need a whole lot but the quality isn't critical. You can't ever get lost quality back on your important shots. Then there are the bigger cards. The reason I don't want to get into larger sizes is that if the card gets corrupted, you lose more photos, plus they are a lot more expensive. I have had good luck with my Kingston cards which were cheap and slower, now I have one Sandisk Ultra II, both seem to be pretty reliable. There was trouble with some brands. Those things are so tiny, it would be so easy to lose the extra ones. I need a better plan to try to avoid that. Be sure to order the right card for the cam. They either take CompactFlash or SD (or proprietary memory sticks), and it would be easy to make a mistake on that.