John,

Thanks! I realized the serial drive was what I needed when I started looking to see what the acronyms were identifying. And thank you very much for the analysis of the types of drives.

I've been pondering when to put on a larger drive, knowing it needed one, but there is always a qualifier. In this case, it is that my daughter is going to college in the fall and will be getting her own computer to take with her. This one that is temporarily disabled is the property of both kids (they even paid about a third of the original price when we bought the first one, that was stolen last year--this is the second in the "kids' computer" series, courtesy Allstate Insurance). It will become more the property of the kid at home, but not entirely. When she comes home on weekends she'll have access to it, and so I don't expect the volume of stuff on it to go down any. I'll probably get her an external hard drive for backing up her college computer (and she needs to also save things on disk). I haven't gotten an external backup for this computer because it is mostly full of games and music. We have differing views on the value of that "data." :)

SRS