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.

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.

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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.

As you may or may not have heard, the next Windows will be literally called Windows 7.

This has confused some people because the total number of Microsoft Windows releases has been way more than 7 – but I digress.

Windows XP is version 5.1.2600.

How do I know this?

…that’s how.

Windows XP was the NT kernel release after Windows 2000 (version 5.0.2195), so if you want to get really technical about it, XP is Windows 5.1.

Windows Vista is NT kernel version 6.0.6001 or just 6.0 for short.

Windows 7 has been reported that it will be using the same kernel as Vista, but will be version 6.1 and not 7.0.

So… Windows 7 has a very distinct chance of having an NT kernel that isn’t representative of the OS retail title.

Maybe Microsoft just likes odd numbers or something.

Windows NT 3.1 did have kernel 3.1. WinNT 3.5 had kernel 3.5, WinNT 3.51 had kernel 3.51 and WinNT 4.0 had kernel 4.0.

All those titles followed what was "under the hood", so to speak.

Windows 7 at present doesn’t.

Um, yeah. A bit odd to say the least.