I see Tiger Direct is offering Western Digital MyBook Essential external hard drives in the 1Tb flavor for $130. What I want to know is: Are these things formatted for Windows XP right out of the box?

These have a USB 2.0 interface ... so they'll be formatted and ready to go. The USB 2.0 interface will run USB 1.0 transfers, but they'll not be very fast so check to make sure your machine will support 2.0.

If your box has a SATA or eSATA port it's worth the extra money to get the faster drive.

And if you are using XP or Vista, I suggest you re-format them as soon as you get yours to NTFS.

They generally come formatted in FAT32, which is done so that they are backward compatible.

But, if you do not have to use this drive with Windows 98 for instance, formating it to NTFX will increase the speed of copying files, and you can copy files larger than 2GB in size.

With FAT you will get a "disk full" error is you try copying files larger than 2GB.

I am not sure how well you know your OS. But to format the HD is very simple.

After you have plugged it in, and the computer has recognized it, right click on it and choose FORMAT from the drop down menu. Click on QUICK FORMAT, which will do it in a few seconds.

Sometimes, your computer might not recognise the hard disk as you plug it in.

Don't panic.

From the desktop, right click MY COMPUTER.
Click on MANAGE
Click on STORAGE
you will get a list of all the drives connected to your computer.

Go down the list, and right click on the new drive, and choose FORMAT.

I just deployed one here at work. They come formatted for use with a MAC but have the software to re-format to NTFS. Takes about 5 minutes. I would suggest installing a firewire card in your computer and using that interface instead of USB.

I use one to keep all my music and photo back ups on.
Every time I turn the darn thing on it resets all the page settings in Vista to default settings.
It's really doing my head in.

Sounds very strange!

What make is it?

Has it got its own software?

Vista had problems early on with peripherals and driver conflicts. Go to the Western Digital website and see if there is updated firmware for the device.

Actually, I seem to have less problems with external devices with Vista than I had with XP Pro?

I also think the problem was caused by the chipset the drive uses, not the operating system.

What gave me this idea was an article I read on one of the websites, where certain external drives used different USB chipsets than others.

Iomega and Buffalo have worked for me without any problems, on several computers.

Lacie gave us quite a bit of hassle when swapped between computers.

For major backup we use DROBO

I have been using several of the 4-disk drobos, and ave just gotten the Drobo Pro.

I am waiting for my order of 2 TB hard disks to arrive and will install them in it.

And just in case some of you wonder why we need so much storage, we have hundreds of DV tapes which I am planning on capturing and saving on these disk.

Just when Vista 64 is getting good with software all starting to catch up and stuff is really fast and reliable the buggers at Microcrap are releasing a new one.
I may try Linux again.

Someone put a SHED load of great music on my ex drive for me, so I got to sort out and back that up before I mess with it.

From the look of it, Windows 7 is not much different than Vista.

They just put a few more things in it - those should have been in Vista in the first place.

Apparently anything that works with Vista is going to work with Windows 7.

I stopped all the Auto Play options, and the external hard drive behaves much better now.