I have an external Western Digital 80 GB drive and have had no problems for 3 years (after I did a surface scan on it). I recommend a surface scan before using the drive. My drive had a few bad sectors that had not been marked off and these casued some pecular problems until this was discovered. It took 30 min to 1 hr to do a thorough surface scan but was well worth it. I noted in your post that you intend to have 'programs' as well as data on this external drive and may use this drive on another computer. Beware that if the programs are "installed" Windows programs, this may not work. It may work if the programs are of the stand alone variety such as code for BASIC, complied FORTRAN, or Visual Basic embedded in an EXCEL work sheet.

Thanks everyone. Lots of useful methods. Mikie - it's good to know about moving entire folders (I don't have my video's in folders - yet - but am just discovering how useful that would be for shows I've recorded for a few seasons - having them altogether). I'd like to double check and ask what "a cmd window" is - and how I'd get there. Again - I have Windows XP (SP3). Sorry to say, Mikie, but I also need more explanation for what "make a shortcut to the destination , within the folder the files are in... then select a bunch of what I want to move, cut&paste onto the shortcut" means. I know someday I'll understand all of this, but I don't know how to make a shortcut to the destination. And once I cut and paste onto the shortcut, what do I do with it? Absolutely there are some big files - so I'm glad to told me to break it up into smaller chunks. I have so far. Thank you. Lynn.

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.

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