Adding Extra Storage to Laptop

If your laptop has a USB or FireWire port, an external drive can be very handy.  If not, you can get PC-CARD/PCMCIA USB cards for a reasonable price.  I recommend a USB 2.0 card and external drive due to the much better performance over older USB 1.1.

External hard drive is definitely the way to go.  There really isn't any room inside your laptop for a second hard drive (they're just not built to support multiple drives).

Since you don't want to replace the current hd, an external is your only way to go.  You can pick up a good 30/40 gig external for probably around 100 bucks.

Note that your laptop only has USB 1.1, so I suggest you use an extra PCMCIA USB 2.0 card also. (maybe later after you've saved some more money)
The others already told you about the USB Drive.

LucF

I'd re-think replacing the internal hard drive. A faster HD on a laptop can really improve it's performance as writing swap and temporary files is a big piece of performace plus you'll have a new drive for your operating system, probably the highest failure rate item on your machine.
I'd go for a USB enclosure that will accomodate a laptop drive and a 5400 rpm drive, ghost your drive to the new one via the USB and swap them. Keep the old drive intact until the new one's nicely burned in as a backup, then you can reformat it and use it to backup your laptop.

Thanks for the advice - If I were to buy an External HD with USB 2.0 would it be fully backwards compatible with the USB 1.1 ports until I could afford to get the PCMCIA USB 2.0 card? Just quite a bit slower?

Can any one recommend a particular model/manufcturer for either the External HD or the USB 2.0 card?

Thanks again,

AT.