John,

I was planning to pick up the 200gig drive when I went over to Fry's today, but that is an Internet only special so I picked up a 300gig Seagate for $90. Either way it is about $30 per 100gig. I'll be working on the kids' computer for a while.

My daughter wants (fortunately) a desktop for her dorm room. They are just so much easier to work on and they're faster. There are computers all over campus, flash drives can carry content (and many, at least at my university library, have fully-functioning productivity software available for working on that content). She can email large files to herself, she can save them on disk, CD, or flash drive. She can even print them on paper. She can work on her computer in her dorm room or at my house or her father's house. A laptop isn't part of our plans.

I did tell her she'd have to backup her work, and we'll probably get a firewire or USB external hard drive for a big backup every so often.

SRS