buying a new hard drive...........

[jonny_uk]

Is there anything i need to take into consideration or is it just picking what size i want and thats it?

I was told by a pcworld salesperson that windows would recognise 500-1000gig hard drives but ive heard people say even 200gig ones arent recognised by windows?

 

[Nitestick]

it depends on which version of windows you are using. check out the thread titled "137gb Barrier" in Hardware Troubleshooting. if you do not have windows 2000 with sp4 or windows xp with sp1 windows will only be able to make a 127GiB partition. in addition to this if your pc is pre ATA100 and 48 bit LBA the drive will not work properly if it is IDE. this is not a problem for SATA drives.

edit: here is the thread
http://techist.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=79821

lol some light reading for you. this explains the problem your friends may have mentioned in detail and how to avoid it

 

[jonny_uk]

hmmm i red about 10lines and its all gone over my head!!
Im not a complete computer retard but i just dont know much about hard drives.

Ive got xp home sp2 anyway so im not sure whether that helps you with telling me what size hard drive i can get?

Id like at least 120 gig if its going to work ok etc.

 

[SHAWN]

No problems with a 250 here in XP SP2.

 

[Nitestick]

yeah, with SP2 you will be fine. in any case a 120gb is below the barrier and would work regardless. judging by your listed specs you should be fine on the hardware side of things, especially if you have SATA

 

[jonny_uk]

Thanks guys

 

[Dante_Caligari]

I had to partition them to get them to work correctly. I now have three partitions, but I still have the complete capacity of my drive.