Yest I realized that I only have 58mb of memory left on my 40gb hard drive (gotta love them MP3's) so now I'm looking for an external hard drive. A big one. I've got close to 30gb's worth of music and looking to expand. What do yall recommend? I'm not looking for anything real fancy. Just plain and simple. I've got a dell computer although I don't remember the model number (I'm on campus and won't find out until this evening). Thanks yall.

 

www.buy.com has one 160Gb from Fantom. I ordered one Saturday.
$60 bucks after $20 rebate.

 

I would go with another internal...a little more money, and faster by far! That's what I'm running for just my music and videos...Serial ATA hard drives rock!

Chris

 

I agree with Chris. Get another internal. Easy to install. I have a 250Gig to go with my main 250 gig, total of 500. I also have a 320 gig external I use for backup - - it is usb2 port activated, but still nowhere near as fast as the internal. Just be sure to match the new one to the old one.

Bob

 

First thing that I would suggest is to burn all of your music to CD's to back them up in case of a crash. My friends college age daughter lost $1600 in downloaded music when her drive went kaput.

 

I'd say internal first, but if you want the portability of an external shoot for a firewire type drive. The you wont (beat yourself over the head) waiting for USB to transfer 50GB worth of mp3s

 

I've already got all of my music backed up on to CD's so that's not an issue. I'm just tired of my computer running slow and I want to get all of this music onto another harddrive. All I want an external for is music only. Nothing else. If it makes any difference, I've got a Dell Dimension 2400. I know the dell's aren't the easiest thing in the world to upgrade and add stuff to and when it comes to building computer's I'm about as good as a drunk elephant doing brain surgery so that's why I was considering external. Simple, easy, and will get the job done.

 

If you want some serious storage, you can get a 750 GB internal HD is on sale at CompUSA this week for $280.

http://www.compusa.com/products/prod...0GB_Hard_Drive

 

As cool as that would be, I think it's just a little overkill for me.

 

Make sure your motherboard supports USB 2.0, other than that, transfer rate going to be SLOOOOOOW. Your modern rock mp3s would be classic rock by the time you got them on your external.

 

You can get a external USB/Firewire enclosure...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817145152 and a cheap IDE http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822148139

It's easy to swap out old IDE drives with the enclosure. I have one with a mobile rack to quickly switch hard drives. The enclosures vary in price, but that's the one I have.

 

You have 2 separate issues. You need more storage but that won't help the speed of the computer. You probably have way more programs running in the background than you need. You need to clean up your startup. You probably also need more memory. The stock dimension 2400 specs say that you have 256mb of memory. My recommendation for a machine to do what you do would be a minimum of 512mb preferrably 1 gig. Memory is cheap. You should slap at least a 512mb stick in there and you'll be much happier with how it runs for you.

 

My mom got a 2400 and it came with 128mb!!! Dang thing would barely run! Shame on Dell for even shipping a system running XP with less than 512MB ram

 

Mine's not a stocker I believe I have the 512mb memory. I'd have to find the book on it but I know for a fact that I got the updated stuff.

 

Most PC's you can right click on the my computer and go to properties. It should tell you in there what processor you are running and the amount of Ram that you have.

On another note, I agree that internal is the way to go. It will be faster, and as long as you have a space on your cable, they are a snap to install. I figure if you can dive into a cummins, you can dive into a hard drive install. Just make sure you unplug the thing before you go messing around inside, but everything else is easy.