No to both, most of those cheaper externals are 5,400rpm drive, which are usually rather slow. Hard drives are usually one of the first things to fail in a computer, so I wont use second hand in a Christmas gift.
Not doing it just yet anyway, so might get lucky and prices drop a bit again. She already has a pc, but it was built as our old media center, so only 2 gigs of ram and I nicked the original hdds out of it for other computer etc. She's one of those teenagers who installs that much junk, all running in the task bar, that she keeps having stuff crash because she runs out of memory and processing power. lol Trying to teach her to close unused stuff down etc, but try explaining to a teenager why she shouldn't have Skype, Windows Live Messenger and stream YouTube whilst playing a 3D game, it's like talking to a brick wall.
No point just increasing the ram she has (only 2 slots on the mobo anyway, and DDR 2 so max I could go to cheaply would be 4 gigs) and it's socket AM2 so I'd rather just build her a new one. Cheeky sod turned around and asked for a laptop... Told her no chance, as given her liking for 3D gaming we're not spending that kind of money. lol Besides, our experience with laptops is they start turning into junk after 12 months usually.
The stupid thing is, I have disused hard drives under my desk in front of me, but they're right old junkers. lol I've got a spare 1tb drive in my pc, but for some stupid reason Windows 7 decided to put the mbr on it, rather than on the SSD I have windows on, or the 2tb striped array I use for data and software.....
Ade
