DD, i just want to give you a big a$$ thank you for everything...

heres what i did, and what happened...

so i was sitting here, like WTF, WHY do i have to order a HDD and not be able to find one... and was thinking, WHY the hell wouldnt the Toshiba's HDD work in the Dell?.. so i said screw it, time to pull em apart...

as you know, the Dell HDD was a Toshiba 2181... well, the Toshiba was a Toshiba 2171 (10 more gigs than the 2181... so i pulled both of em out, and they looked exactly the same... took them out of the caddys, pulled the adapter off the 2181 that Dell uses, and slipped it on to the 2171 and it went on perfectly... slid it into the Dell with zero issues, and fired it up... at first i was getting the blue screen error code, so, i took the OS disk from dell, and booted from that... it asked what partition to install on, so i clicked the only one available... well that had an OS on it already.. when it got screwed, i installed a Windows disk onto it, that i didnt have the product Key for, so, it gave me like 15 days or something and then nada... so i formatted that partition, and started installing the disk that came with the Dell....

went off without a hitch... installed drivers, no problem... then i went to starting connecting to the internet... i had a few little bugs to work out, but i GOT IT!!! the computer is working flawlessly, and is rather quick for however old it is...

just want to give a big THANK YOU for your help during this.. i really appreciate the time you took to even respond to me with the information you provided... if i can make it up to you someday, i will gladly do that...

once again, THANKS...

greetings from Puyallup



PS, its the Dell

oh yeah, i still would like to get 2 larger HDDs for both of these, and for some reason i didnt see the Amazon link you posted, but those look like great deals, and i will be getting 2 of them....