fwiw Speaking of backups... recently playing around... Have 8gb ram so I used a freeware, RamDisk, a very small program, to make a RamDrive = 770mb for RediBoost & balance for Browser cache & windows low disk space avoidance. Anyhow while searching web for how people use ram disks trying to figure out what I was doing wrong .. initially my startup & shutdown times went up ... I came across a regedit setting on increasing hard disk cache.. for win 7 / vista anyhow.. maybe same for xp. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management LargeSystemCache default 0, changed to 1 = supposed to be hard drive cache. ......... after changes both graphics ratings went up .1 from 6.2 to 6.3 in Windows Experience Index Daily backup & image went from 17 minutes to 11 consistently . Just confirmed once now, it was the registry change that sped up the backups. Thats quite a time savings here ... I usually stop and twiddle my thumbs when backup runs. Thought some here may be interested in trying that registry tweak.

I may be wrong, but I think you can only use external drives as main drives if they're SCSI or SATA. If you're dealing with USB devices, they're too slow. Some programs will not install on external drives. I may be misreading Ravencajun's last sentence. If you're looking for an external drive, you want to make sure you get something that is a portable drive. It would probably include all the cables. For a laptop replacement drive, you don't need the cables. What is probably the easiest way to upgrade a laptop hard drive is to get one of these EZupgrade enclosures with a drive. The nice thing about the enclosure is that it will work for either SATA or ATA. It includes software so that you can basically do the image and restore in one step, then just swap drives. Since your laptop is 5 years old and had a 6 gb drive to start, it's probably ATA/IDE/EIDE rather than SATA. You could get something like this with the EZ upgrade for less than $100. You'd put the new drive in the enclosure, run the software to clone the drive, turn everything off, pull the current drive, put in the new one and if all goes well, you can just start right up.

Some cpu's, maybe all of them ... you can look in power management and set the minimum and maximum speeds for the CPU. Mine are set 5% minimum 100% max.. they speed up and slow down on demand extremely fast..... you can lower the max to maybe 95% see if that helps cool it down a bit. It should greatly cool the cpu. If you know you have an Intel chipset, or even if you don't know.. you can visit support intel.com and have it scan for updated/current intel drivers. They've greatly improved things in past couple months,, for all their components,,, maybe in anticipation of Win8 upgrades and the demands microsoft has placed on energy efficiency lately. Speedy SSD drives.. wow, some are very nice, but pricey. My laptop came with 5400rpm sata2 but is sata3 capable.. makes for an expensive wish. Newer versions of SSHD's boots and starts up your most used favorite programs nearly the same SSD fast and still isn't as reliable as standard hd. and they too run hotter.

This is a big *Thank you* and an update to those who offered encouragement and comments. 1. I ended up using MiniTool and it did just what it was supposed to. I had hooked the new SSD to the computer with a USB cable, but even then the transfer only took an hour (no videos, not very many photos). I had a little trouble inside the tower because of a dearth of cables. HP Pavillions apparently don't waste an inch of wire. Because of that I wasn't able to hook up a spare drive as I'd hoped, but I may be able to get more cables in there "someday", and next time I buy a desktop, if I do, I'll look inside for more flexibility. Also had some trouble mounting the new drive. The 2.5" adapter I picked up at BB Big Box wasn't suitable, but I ended up being able to mount directly to the internal framework once I found suitable screws. I probably could have gotten away with a zip strip or such, but it would have screamed "amateur" too loud ... As it happens I also had a drive from an older Gateway, and wanted to see if anything could be recovered from it. So while I had my box apart I plugged in that drive, booted it with the USB boot disk I'd made for this project, and got it to respond to the recovery disks that came with it. I lost all the files, but we had most of those backed up from before, so sooner or late I'll try to restore those. So all in all I took Richard's advice and had fun, and now my wife thinks I'm a genius. Thanks again! :-)M