partition your drive. Give yourself a data partition and a "Windows" partiton. Make them both NTFS, easier to recover data from. If you make the windows partition FAT32 then upgrade to NTFS later the conversion takes ages and makes the block size too small, been there, done that :) XP (I'm using XP pro) is a fairly solid OS, never had it die on me, it's got a bit flaky once or twice, but I've not had to re-install yet or muck about with it that much. Just make sure sure you turn off all the eye candy and "hand holding" wizards, (unless you think you need them) as that will make it much faster and less cluttered. You can compress the filesystems, but it takes longer to access your data and apart from turning the text blue doesn't accomplish much. later jb