after playing with computers since the days of Windows 3.0 you know before there was such a thing as a mouse, I have seen a steady increase in the pattern of things that will screw-up your computer, in the old days (you know - last week) we did not have to worry about viruses, spyware and things that go S-O-B in the night, between the evil maniacal people trying to intentionally plague me and the software manufacturers that seem to think the world is their beta test, I have what I believe is a working solution to an age old problem, it only has one hurdle left to overcome, first - I am convinced that multiple hard drives is not a luxury it is a necessity, keep your data out of your C drive, in my unit there is nothing in "My Documents" for very long, I regard it as a temp location, all of my information such as music, photos, letters, etc, are organized on other hard drives, and I have an external HD for auxiliary back-up and a DVD burner for a hard copy back-up, I have had the unfortunate circumstance at least twice where it was the best choice to format the C drive and just plain start over, by choosing this data storage method I have the advantage of a fresh install of the OS and then the programs, while the data is residing elsewhere, this method always removes all of the problems whether self inflicted or acquired (the last was installing the new Audigy 2G ZS, already had an ATI All in Wonder, incredible driver conflict, need to install Audigy first, then ATI, this was of course not well known at the release of the new software, hard to believe), now the only hurdle left in my choice is that it takes time to re-install programs, (I have the urge to put them on a different HD then while everything is normal, back-up the registry - do any of you do that ?)however have you noticed that you have a lot of programs that you just do not use anymore, they take up HD space and add time to scans, so to me the moral of the story is the sooner you began to think of hard drives as you once thought of folders, the safer your data will be - for the best way to maintain a healthy computer according to the experts (I am not one) is to periodically format and start over (I recommend once a year), those that subscribe to this method will tell you that they never have slow PCs, because if you could see all the garbage that you accumulate in 1 year you would be amazed, and I spend a lot of time on general maintaince, once a week minimum I delete all temp files, search and delete all thumbs.db files, then run SpyBot, AddAware, full virus scan, check disk and de-fragment all HDs, this may seem radical therapy to some of you, but then we used to say that about system restore and other roll-back programs, but then look how many times they have saved your proverbial ass, best of luck, Mitsubishiman Dell Dimension 8200 Windows XP Pro - SP1 2.53 GHz Pentium 4 533 MHz front side bus 1.024 GB RDRAM HD-1, 120 GB NTFS internal HD-2, 120 GB NTFS internal HD-3, 250 GB NTFS internal HD-4, 80 GB FAT32 external ATI 128 MB ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 XT GRAPHICS CARD Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Sound Card LITEON DVD ROM LTD 163 PLEXTOR DVD PX-709A still waiting to see how everyone else does with SP2, I heard I will loose Roxio 5, I switched to Nero 6 after a fiasco with Roxio 6, so I hope all goes well for everyone. :wall: