Chuck, re. upping the size of the HD, I had (I think) the same lappy and I installed a bigger drive and the damn thing never worked properly again even with a clean install of the operating system (XP) when I reverted to the old HD all was fine again. I believe in my researches on the net I found something about the BIOS not being able to handle a bigger drive (I went to 250Gb). I have no idea if that was the case but this was my experience and I'm not a novice with 'puters, although not in your league :-)