I have an old clunky Presario 1692 laptop. Running XP with only 9GM hard drive and it just doesn’t cut it! Two questions: 1. Are laptop internal hard-drives "universal" like desktops? What's my chance of finding a reasonable priced l upgrade? 2. Would a USB external work to speed up things or will it just be another piece of hardware to slow things down?

1. Pretty much so. Pretty good...check with an online harddrive vendor. 2. It would be slower than an internal hdd and you may have trouble getting it to work well on an older machine. Skip

If you have 9GB HD that should be large enough for your OS and other software. Why don't you get a USB external HD for your other files. Biggest problem might be that your comp is probably USB1, which is kind of slow. If you don't need speed that would be a viable option. You ask if you can speed things up. A new HD isn't going to speed things up in that laptop. Just give you more storage space. Assuming that the machine can accept a larger HD.

Laptop parts and install instructions http://www.impactcomputers.com/12j4569-560.html

Thanks for the suggestions, especially Gene for that URL. I think I will probably buy one of their 20GB drives. BTW my current drive is 6GB not 9GB. The I.T. guy at work said I need a larger drive so XP can hove “more room to work”. Well anyway now that I have found a drive I have another question. It seems to me like the answer is no but I was wondering if there is any way to transfer the data from the old drive to the new. I thought I saw something about that on-line but I can’t seem to find it now. I will probably need to do a bunch of backing up. Pity you can’t back up to CD with XP backup. Never knew why Microsoft didn’t make provisions for that but that is a different topic.