I've had my 4GB hard drive for about seven years now. Today, when I booted up my Windows box, it started to make sad noises. That, coupled with the problems I've had running Win2K (games aren't quite happy with it, my 3D audio card doesn't work right with it, and some "system service" keeps failing to load), I decided to move on and buy a big fast hard drive and install Win XP home edition.

I've had my eye on a big fast hard drive for a while, but I finally decided to bite the bullet. I got a Maxtor 7200 RPM 40 GB drive, although I must confess I didn't really research the choice. I pretty much drove out to Fry's and picked the hard drive closest to $100 that wasn't from a fly-by-night company. So we'll see :). I'm a little nervous since the MaxBlast II software timed out after formatting the drive... Still, the hard drive was the next bottleneck that had to be eliminated on my system, and I'm looking forward to improved game performance. The next one? More VRAM on a new video card, but I'm going to wait for the next Doom game to come out before I spend those bucks.

I've been avoiding XP for the simple reason that I don't really like Microsoft's new licensing policy. On the other hand, I do like the NT kernel that XP is based on (my current problems with Win2K aside). I also feel that I should at least have a working familiarity with OS X's visual imitator. I'd like to see how some of the apps (like the movie maker) actually work. More importantly, XP is where consumer driver development is centered, and I use the machine for pretty much one thing: games.

Anyway, the nice thing about all of this is that I don't live on Windows anymore, so it's no big deal to pop out one drive, pop in a new one, reformat it, and install Windows from scratch. All of my real data lives on my TiBook now, where it remains safe and sound.  2:08:18 PM