A friend of mine overseas needs me to ship her data on an external hard disk drive. How do I figure out which drive would be compatible? She has an HP/compaq nc8430 laptop running Windows 2000, though she says she'll switch to Vista in a couple months. I'm concerned because she said some ext HDD don't work with her machine. In particular, ones w/o their own power source. Would it be enough for me to buy a USB 2.0 ext HDD with its own power source?

Pretty much any external drive will work with any computer. The one thing to watch for is how you format the drive. You'll have several options, usually including FAT32 or NTFS. In this case, here computer can read either, so I would go with NTFS. The other issue you bring up is power. Some drives attempt to power themselves from the USB port. Depending on the computer, the USB port may not provide enough current. The easy way to avoid this is to get a drive that has it's own seperate power supply. -Ryan Adams Free Computer Tips and more:http://RyanTAdams.com Paid Tech Support: Black Diamond