Get a bigger hard disk

Price:

750GB Samsung SpinPoint F1 HD753LJ - £91.52;

Total price: £91.52

Supplier: www.scan.co.uk

1. Hard disks are so cheap now that there's simply no reason to persevere with an old 80GB EIDE drive from four years ago that clicks like your grandpa's knees in the morning. Extra disk space may not sound like the sexiest thing on earth, but it provides scope to massively improve your PC.

You can buy three-quarters of a terabyte of storage for just £91.52. Not only does the Samsung HD753LJ have buckets of hard disk space to house that lossless audio collection you've been dreaming about, or even all those (legal) movies you want to download, but it's also very fast. This superb drive loaded our Crysis test level in just 36 seconds, making it even quicker than the Western Digital Raptor X when it comes to game loading times.

2. Once you've obtained your new hard drive, we recommend that you divide it into two partitions when you install Vista; one for the OS and programs, and the other for documents and other apps. This basically means that you won't lose all your data if you ever need to reinstall Windows and reformat your C drive.

To do this, click on Disk 0 Allocated Space when you reach the 'Where do you want to Install Windows?' screen in the Vista installation routine. Click on New, and then type in how much hard drive space you want for your C drive. Multiply your chosen number of gigabytes by 1,024 and enter it in the field. In our case, we wanted 60GB, so we typed in 61440. After that, click on Apply and then click on Format. You can now select the 60GB Disk 0 Partition 1 at the top and click Next to install Windows on that part of the disk.

3. We also highly recommend installing some rubber grommets to absorb the vibrations from your hard drive before they start rattling the hard drive cage in your case. These are included in the Nexus Anti Vibration kit.

• Tidy your cables
• Modify an MSI Wind
• Hide your ATX power cables
• Monitor your PC with an analogue meter
• Cool your VRMs
• Make your own SSD for less than £20
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• Set up a secure browsing environment
• Remove motherboard heatsinks and heatpipes
• Remove a GPU cooler

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