Using NewEgg, here’s the scoop on what hard drives cost right now.

Cheapest of the cheap: Hitachi Deskstar, 80GB, $32.99. And yes it is a SATA 3GB/s. Bear in mind a Western Digital flavor is just one dollar more.

King of the hill (price-wise): HP 347708-B22 147GB, $499. What makes this hard drive expensive is its 15,000 RPM. If you feel inclined to buy one of these, bear in mind it’s a SCSI interface.

Solid State Disks: All of them are still too expensive and makes the HP listing above look like a steal. See, the deal is that if you want SSD now, you’ll most likely need the controller card to go with it. And this can easily bust over $1,000. But even if you have the controller card and just want the SATA II SSD alone, 120GB can cost $400.

Drives that normal people would actually want

The 500GB drives are now below the $60 price point, many of which have free shipping.

1TB drives are now below the $80 price point. I can’t believe this is true but it is. If prices keep dropping at this rate, 1TB will be had for $50 by fourth quarter 2009.

Make no mistake, 1TB is huge. It will take you a good long time to fill that. But the problem that presents itself is how to back it up. The solution is to buy two 1TB drives. One for your primary; the other as backup.

Important note to Windows XP users concerning hard drives

A basic NTFS volume has a maximum recognized size of 2TB. With 64KB clusters, it is possible to achieve a 256TB dynamic volume.

If you intend to go over 2TB with NTFS, get educated on how to create or convert to dynamic volumes. Everything you need to know about those type of volumes is in that link. Read it and bookmark it.

The PCMech Premium members have read (and seen in video) in great detail the lengths I go to to instruct how to archive email, be it POP, IMAP, Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail and so on.

This article however is a freebie because it involves now-ancient mail data formats and how to convert them to modern format. And I know there are some poor souls out there still using these format types, so hopefully after reading this they will upgrade to something better like Mozilla Thunderbird, Windows Live Mail or a current version of Microsoft Outlook.

And if you hate email clients, once you pull mail into a client you can push it over to Gmail (IMAP/any modern mail client) or Hotmail (DeltaSync/Windows Live Mail) afterwards.

The two ancient formats I will speak of are Eudora and pre-2003 Microsoft Outlook PST archives. Very recently I discovered I had email archives on CD dating all the way back to 2001 which used these two formats. I wrote about this on my personal site, so I can speak first hand on how the conversions work.

Eudora to Thunderbird

Believe it or not there are those who still use Eudora and absolutely positively refuse to give it up (much like Microsoft Outlook users). They are affectionately called "Eudorka" users.

Eudora has an interesting way of storing mail, because if any mail contains a file attachment it is not stored within the individual emails themselves but rather a separate directory called "attach". This is not as odd as you would think because computers back then were slower, and separating the attachments from the mail itself actually worked better as it took less system resource. This is part of the reason Eudorka people love the client so much.

The easy way

Use Mozilla Thunderbird. It has built-in import support for Eudora import. However it will not grab the file attachments. Not with Eudora 5.1, anyway.

The hard way

On a Mac: Eudora Mailbox Cleaner

On Windows: Eudora Rescue

Both of these will convert to a more modern mbox format that Thunderbird can import easily including all the file attachments. But neither are easy to use. Works, yes, but not easy.

Microsoft Outlook PST to Windows Live Mail

The deal with Outlook PST files is that the pre-2003 Outlook client has a maximum allowed PST size of 2GB. Those who have worked in tech support long enough are quite familiar with the Inbox Repair Tool, a.k.a. scanpst.exe to fix/repair the stupid thing whenever it reaches its cap.

Outlook 2003 to present version on the other hand has a 33TB PST file size limit using the modern unicode format. Huge difference. There is no automatic way to convert an old PST to the current unicode one. But you can perform an import. More on that in a moment.

The easy way

Assuming you’re using Windows XP, if you already have Outlook 97 to 2000 installed (why you’re using something that old I have no idea), have Outlook Express 6 import all your mail. Go into Outlook Express, click File, Import, Messages, select Microsoft Outlook and it’s a done deal.

After that, run Windows Live Mail and click File, Import, Messages and pull in all your mail from Outlook Express 6. Works like a charm. After that, go back to OE6 and delete all the mail out of there since you’ll be using WLmail.

The hard way

Buy a new copy of Outlook, perform an import from the old PST to a new unicode version which the current Outlook creates by default. Remember, there is no automatic conversion from old-to-new PST. You must import from the old to the new manually. I label this as the hard way because you have to flip out cash to do it. Otherwise it’s easy.

Q: Can you convert a Microsoft Outlook pre-2003 PST without Outlook?

A: No. It’s a protected format by Microsoft. There is no known utility (none that I know of anyway) that will convert a PST without having Outlook physically installed. You absolutely must do it the Outlook way.

This, by the way, is a huge reason I am very anti-Outlook. I have never liked the fact that everything you do in a local Outlook database is one big honkin’ proprietary file that cannot be worked with unless you specifically have the Outlook client installed.

Should you fear that the email client you upgrade to will become obsolete?

All software inevitably becomes obsolete. What you have to do is use software that is continually developed with newer versions over time that you either upgrade to for free or purchase when needed.

If you use Microsoft Outlook, yes you will have to buy a new version of it every few years and there’s no way around that. And as long as Microsoft exists and people store data locally, there will be Outlook. It will be around a long, long time.

If you use a free mail client, you will have to periodically download and install an upgrade it when new versions are released. Mozilla Thunderbird/SeaMonkey is actively developed, as is Apple Mail and Opera’s built-in mail client. Ones that have active development and widespread use will stick around for a long time.

Is the email client on the deathbed?

No. Not by a long shot. The day we have no more email client programs is the day we have flying cars. Just stick with a current version of an email client and you’ll be a-okay.

To you Eudorkas out there, don’t go with Penelope. For the love of creamed corn and Christmas, use Thunderbird.

ZoomIt v3.01 by Sysinternals will allow you roughly the same screen-zoom capabilities that you have in a Linux desktop with 3D effects enabled (Compiz) or Mac OS X. It’s a nice small utility (only 129k before install!) and works in both XP and Vista.

If you use your computer screen on a live webcast or make presentations to people often using your computer, this is a must-have utility and you’ll make very good use out of it.

And yes, it’s free.

To those wondering if it has the same "smoothness" as Linux or OS X does, not quite. But it’s close and it works well.

As a long-time Windows user I’ve seen a few BSODs in my day. The version of Windows I had the most BSODs with was Windows 3.10. Not 3.11. Not 3.11 WFWG. Just plain ol’ 3.1. I never really had BSOD trouble with Windows 95, 98, NT, 2000 or XP unless I had a hardware failure (usually right before the hard drive was about to go FUBAR on me).

There is actually a Microsoft TechNet article called Demystifying the ‘Blue Screen of Death’ that does truly help in making sense of that blue screen, should you get one.

Some of the BSOD messages I’ve received have been:

INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE

This simply means Windows can’t read the hard disk correctly. I’ve encountered this when an older hard drive develops a few bad sectors. It doesn’t mean you have to throw the hard drive out. You can perform a regular (meaning not "quick") format which will mark those bad sectors, making the drive hopefully usable again.

NTFS_FILE_SYSTEM

In my experience this usually happens when your hard disk just has too much stuff on it and the data corrupts easily. For example, if you have a 120GB hard drive and 118GB is in use, you might get an NTFS_FILE_SYSTEM error until you free up some space, DEFRAG it (and run a CCleaner too just for safe measure).

Poorly programmed or too-old driver

In extremely rare instances I’ll download a driver and Windows doesn’t "agree" with it too well usually because it’s too old. For example, if I install a brand new nVidia video card but then use the drivers meant for a GeForce 6 (several generations ago), yeah, you most likely will get a BSOD out of this – and will be listed as such.

Solution: Always use current drivers. Head into "Safe Mode", kill the driver, reboot normally, install the newer version and this fixes driver-specific BSODs 99% of the time.

~ ~ ~

The TechNet article has a ton of info on how to read BSODs and understand what one is trying to tell you. So if your Windows installation happens to be "going blue" a lot, that article will certainly help.

One of the lesser-known features in Windows (ever since Windows 2000 and possibly even as far back as Windows 98) is the ability to have multiple application bars aside from the main taskbar itself.

See video below for details on how to do this.