[Kaistar]

madmike said it all. lol.

[Gary]

Thanks Mike.

Now you have put my mind at rest, I think I will go ahead and buy it.

I'll take this opportunity to thank Kaistar and yourself for your help and advice. But don't think this is the end. I'll be back with questions about transferring stuff from old to new.

Again, thank you both very much.
ATB Gary.

[madmikejt12]

thanks for the thanks

and thanks Kaistar for pointing that out about the microITX board, i would have missed that!!

as for transfering files, it depends how much you have, you could copy them to cd (700mb per cd) or DVD (4.7GB per single layer DVD) or, you could get a hard drive caddy, insert your old hard drive into it and then plug it into your new PC via USB

you can get them from here
the one you want is the 3.5” USB 2.0 Aluminium Enclosure Hard drive HDD Caddy with Fan (2nd down on the right)

This is well worth having, I have one and have found it very useful especialy when performing clean installs.

I would also ask at the shop how much they charge for partitioning the drive before setting up windows (it may be free because it is such an easy procedure) this is so that if you have any errors you can safely perform a clean install of windows without losing pictures, music, videos and important documents.

On my computer, i have 2x 80GB HD's split into
Internal HD
C (o/s)~40GB
D (Programs)~40GB
External HD
F (music and documents)~65GB
G (Downloads)~10GB

If i was to reformat now, i would leave my internal drive as 1 because programs need to be re-installed anyway.

I would sugest you have 2 partitions, 1 for your o/s, software and games and one for music, videos, documents ect

I have 4 because i like to keep my computer organised.

The size of each would depend on how much of each you plan to have

You can change the location of "My documents" to a different hard drive (which also changes "my music" "my videos" and "my pictures") which would be useful if you were going to partion your drive.

Hope this helps, sorry if it is too much!
Mike


(P.S. the above is just advice/my personal opinion and you do obviously do not need to do everything i have said... just in case that wasnt clear lol)

[Kaistar]

no prob man. you're more than welcome

now i had no idea you can change the directory of My Documents. that's something new. mind telling how?

as a side note, if you're a person who downloads alot/often, it might be a good idea to partition a section for your downloaded softwares and such. which is what i do. since just IN CASE you get hit by a virus, you can back up the other files/drives with less risk.

[madmikejt12]

click start> rt. click my documents, clich properties and change the target