hello, i have a compaq armada m700... and im using about 5 gigabytes out of the 6 on the hard drive. (this is a refurbished laptop with drivers, programs, ... installed that i dont have the cd's to...basically they were installed than given to me)I want to keep all the drivers, programs, ect... aprox. 5 gigs. possibly onto media? because i want to reformat and reinstall xp. how would i go about doing this? is there a program out there that can take large info(5gigs) and somehow condense it in zip or anyhting??

I don't think a CDs maximum compacity of 700MB can have that done. Why don't you use more than one CD?

You can try Powerquest Drive Image (actual Version is 7 for XP and it comes also with Drive Image 2002 for older Windows systems. Drive Image make a harddrive backup and can compress the data on the drive by 40 or 50% (your choice). I work myself with it and is worth the money, saved my systems a couple of times already! BTW: Drive Image can also copy directly onto a CD or another computer if you have a network!

Easiest would be to use 6 CDs and copy the 5BG directly. I've backed up many salvaged hard drives this way. Also, I'm sure you've done this, delete everything you don't need from the drive, such as Temp folders, internet caches, etc. Best Luck, Bob