Installed a new Western Digital 120gb hard drive to replace my rapidly shrinking 40gb WD drive. I got a pretty good deal - $79 after rebate. For kicks, I thought I would try the WD DataLifegurad tools to do disk to disk copy. Well, I started the copy and it said it was going to take 6 hours or so. It seems to be very crude and does a file by file copy. I thought it would be more efficient? I bailed out and rebooted with my Powerquest Disk Image 2002 program. This was much better and copied the entire 40gb (25gb used) in under 30 minutes. So much for the WD utilities.

One benefit, besides more disk space, is the 8mb buffer included on the new drive. I had heard this was almost like a processor upgrade and sure enough programs load noticeably more quickly.

I'm almost finished with this system. When DVD-R/RW drives get to about $100, I'll install one. And sometime when LCD panels get really cheap I'll replace my aged but very useful NEC 4FGe that I've had since about 1983.