Pc Ram...

[marinyork]

Maxtor, scary people...

 

[Carwash]

Clonezilla is a free alternative to Norton Ghost.

 

[Maz]

Maxtor, scary people...

Care to expand?

 

[marinyork]

Care to expand?

Yes, they aren't the best of people at making HDs imho. It's a mute point now as it's a bit like skoda being a vw in disguise as they got bought out by seagate which are more the equivalent of VW. It's a twinge reaction to the name.

HDs are strange things as normally it is when the drive that was designed that matters rather than what the manufacturers claim the specs are. A new drive will almost certainly be quieter (but there are still the odd drives that are noisy). If the drive is a bit sluggish it's definitely worth replacing it as we're talking so little money here. If you were on vista (which you're not) you'd see the ratings surge up on replacing the HD.

 

[ColinJ]

Ideally I would install the new disk, make a ~40gb partition and reinstall Windows from scratch. Once up and running and you have reinstalled your apps I would stick in the old disk as a secondary drive, create a partition from the remaining free disk space on the new disk and then copy all your data onto it.

Once happy you can remove and discard the old drive.

I would set aside an entire weekend to do this as it rarely goes completely hitch free. If you do decide to get a new disk and you cannot find your old Windows XP disk let me know by PM and we can probably sort something out.

How about keeping it as a backup drive?