upgrading hd

[bmgs0829]

Hi-
I need to upgrade my hd right now I have an ancient system. P3 400 Mhz 256 ram, and a 4.3 G hd yes thats a 4.3 g hd. The system started with W98 but I upgraded to WIn XP. I found a 250-300 G hd with an ATA-133 interface. Would something like this work. Just work am not worried about speed as you can see my system is slow enough but I dont mind. Any help would be great.

[jlreich]

With an old system like that I would worry about the BIOS hard drive size limitations. It may only recognize a small portion of the drive. I would recommend installing a PCI IDE controller card like one of these (http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.asp?Manufactory=&PropertyCodeValue=1932%3A12548&PropertyCodeValue=0&PropertyCodeValue=0&PropertyCodeValue=0&PropertyCodeValue=0&description=&MinPrice=&MaxPrice=&SubCategory=410&Submit=Property). That would eliminate that problem.

After that, size and manufacturer is up to you. Only thing I would recommend is getting one with a 3-5 year warranty.

[Paul Komski]

Regardless of the BIOS also ensure you are installing at least WinXPSP1 if the installation partition is to be larger than 128GB. To be on the safe side only initially install into a smallish partition - say 10GB. There is software which can resize later on should that be wanted.