Can anyone advise me as to the best place to buy a new hard drive IDE 133 160Gb,

Also how easy is it for a complete novice to reinstall windows xp on the computer? Would I be able to get advice from this site to help me as I really want to give it a go.

thanks in advance for your help

Hi maroulla,

Check out these pages at EBuyer or PCNextDay .

I usually use EBuyer - they have competitive prices, quick delivery and operate a no-quibble returns policy. PCNextDay do what it says on the can! Again, quick delivery and competitive prices.

I would stick with WD, Seagate or Maxtor and get the model with the largest cache if you have a choice. Not sure why you specify a 160GB drive (probably replacing one that size?) but generally speaking, the bigger the better.

You should have no problems installing XP - there is an excellent article here to guide you through it. Don't worry - it takes longer to read that article than to perform the install process

I would suggest you make a main partition of around 20GB and perhaps split the rest of the drive into 2 further partitions. You will be asked what you want during the installation process and Windows will look after it for you, so you don't need to be technically minded or have a degree in computer science.

Each partition can be thought of as a separate disk. If you store your data (documents, photos, accounts and so on) on one of the other partitions then they will remain safe even if you have to reinstall Windows at a later date.

Having said all that, please feel free to ask anything here and there will be someone along to assist you.
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