First Steps...

Towards a new PC...

Later this year I intend to replace the faithfull PC under my desk, it's almost 4 years old now (OK, so it's had a memory upgrade [512MB -> 2GB], Graphics card upgrade [Radeon 9600 - £100 4 years ago!], Second HDD fitted, and both DVD ROM and CD Burner replaced), but at it's heart it is still a 2.8 Ghz P4, and as such it's starting to show it's age when running things like Flight Sim X, Photoshop CS2, etc.

One potential problem in moving to a new machine has now been eliminated... I have replace the original 120 GB ATA drive with a 250GB SATA unit (£71 from PCWorld + £20 for a SATA PCI card), and moved all *my* data to that drive.. I have a 100GB Data drive [D:], a 100 GB Music drive [M:] and a 32GB Pictures drive [P:] - Good drive naming or what! The Windows XP OS is now alone on the ATA drive in a 40 GB patrition, and that leaves me plenty of room to install Vista in a second partition on the same drive.

Any new PC, will be fitted with SATA as standard, so this drive can simply be moved to the new machine...

[EDIT:] It's amazing how much quieter the new drive is!! I can hardly tell if the PC is actually switched on any more, and it does seem to be quite a bit 'snappier' when loading data. Not sure if it's the drive itself, or if just transferring the data across has made a better job of defrag'ing than Diskeeper