Those are pretty bad as well.

I haven't bought one in a while but the prices were ludicrous at some point due to WD's factory being flooded in Thailand. But I think before that I bought 1 TB for ~40 pounds or so.
In any case more storage is always a good thing and it helps to have multiple functional Windows installations in case your main installations goes tits up. Got a horrible virus a while ago, booted up from another drive, ran the scan, werks like clockwork.

While you're at it...

Remove all system cleaners, disk defragmentation tools, registry cleaners, leftover cleaners, basically, everything that you use to maintain your system.

The OS is smart about these things, and does maintenance better than those tools ever will.

i mostly just want two or three items: bards tale(which i think is freeware now), wizardry 1-6, and eye of the beholder.

those games are awsome! but you have to pay quiet a bit to get them on amazon, you have to buy the wizardry collection, or the forgotten realms archives, or the ultimate rpg archives.

Those should actually be on the more acceptable abandonware sites like Home of the Underdogs and Abandonia who also support, cooperate with and promote GOG (and how I found out about GOG).

well, heres an update:

my computer was toast, so my dad did something, not sure what, but now its back to factory defaults and everythings been uninstalled, but the directorys are still there, and all my files are still there.

so i have to reinstall everything, but all my saves and whatnot should be intacact! SCORE~

new update: my computer works now, but not very well.

the system will run all sorts of stuff, but there comes a time when suddenly, things freeze up and stop working.

browsing the internet goes from being a simple rewarding task, to being a nightmere of slowness and NOT RESPONDING messages.

and the windows media player will play a song, sometimes it'll get choppy or the next song on the list wont load.

it even happens with my games, suddenly things will take forever to load and the dialouge will not be in sync. I don't think its the game either, i think it's my system.


I figure all i have to do is run windows update a couple times, and it'll fix everything.


anybody else have any experiance with this and think they can lend some good advice?

^^^ this ^^^, my windows 7 machine works 24/7/365 with restarts only for upgrades, this was a windows 7 day 1 purchase and it's working ever since

nice! you realize of course, that not EVERY machine is going to work like yours does! windows does have flaws, hardware stops working, viruses attack. I got mine three years ago, and i've basically had it on without turning it off mostly for the whole 3 years without ANY problems!

all i'm saying is, good luck my freinds without any problems ever, you are a truely exceptional lot.

Almost all of them will if you properly assemble them, keep the system clean with antiviruses and common sense and take care of them. All the machines I ever built for my clients are still working without any problems in ordinary production scenarios (9am-5pm every day) :)
OS's are XP and windows 7, both x64 and x86 variants.

Windows 7 Maintenance 101:

Install MSE.
Do Disk Cleanup once a month, usually after Patch Tuesday.

Windows 8 Maintenance 101:

Do Disk Cleanup once a month, usually after Patch Tuesday.

Re-installing is in the cards for me too, but only because I want to re-size my partitions on the internal hard drive; And update the mac partition to Mountain Lion. I'll stick with windows 7 since it does just fine in bootcamp, but the thought of downloading all the updates again, on top of the tedium of setting up not one but two installs...

Not sure if I should just get it done before the games of September/October drop or wait till I'm done with them.

--

The trouble with external hard drives is you can never stop at one, no matter how large they are. I find myself keeping so much old shit just because Its an option. Even old tv shows I've recorded on my DVR (mpeg 2 TS).