My sympathies Dean. My research has showed the the Seagate external hard drives, which I think used to be called Maxtor's, are the best of the backup HD's. I have several and like them a lot. I don't install any of the software that comes with them, but you might want to if you need automatic backup functions. Below is a picture of a misbehaving laptop I had years back. I wanted to give it away so tried to format the HD; the screen promptly told me something to the effect, "where have you been newb?! We're Windows 95 now and don't do this "format C" thing any more because we don't trust you to manage your own computer".... This was my answer to that. This picture hangs on the wall of computer geeks around the globe. This was a fully functional $4500 laptop(on it's third mother board by the way), but a guy has to draw the line on principles somewhere...
