Fooles -

Your probably right on the Win98 and USB. I made very little use of USB when I had '98. It's almost certain that a machine running Win98 will not have USB-2 ports and theory and reality for USB-1 were not closely coupled. Some Win98 computers may not even have a USB port, although if there's an available slot a port card shouldn't be more than about $20 (US) [Is that down to $0.39 AUS since Bush tanked the dollar?]

Any external USB hard drives should come with appropriate drivers, and instructions for mounting them with Win98. Transfers will be "slow" with USB-1, but you're unlikely to have a very large drive to copy things from in a Win98 computer, so even at creepy-crawly USB-1 speeds the download shouldn't be too long. Uploading from the external to the new one should be at USB-2 speed, and future backups to the external will also be faster, although even with USB-2 moving 120 GB (a "nominal size" for a full backup of any one of the 5 HDs with data on my machines) may take an hour or so.

John