Trotter said:@ Little a,
You said it was slow of late... Have you pulled any maintenance of your lappy to keep it up to speed?
i should really clarify.. my pc's performance has been constant all these years, even now it does what it used to do. i don't really do much beyong word processing so it's not a problem.
lately, however, i've started ripping cd's. one day i compared the ripping speed to my friends apple notebook and his was twice as fast and it's not even a fast one. mine rips at 5x-6x which isn't bad but not what i'd like either. hence the problem.
i've been reading the forum and i think the cheaper, most pragmatic way to do it would be to build a pc with a faster processor to handle the ripping and leave the notebook for fieldwork.
unless adding some memory (not much since i only have room for another 128MB) and doing the external HD thing would really make a difference in ripping speed.
btw, thanks for the recommendations. i constantly check my system for viruses and defragment regularly.
a