Windows 7

What I currently have is 2 drives, 150Gb and 300Gb drives and a new Blu-Ray drive (all SATA - so it's found the Blu-Ray drive and drivers fine). - Kol Tregaskes

Hi kol, you should update your mainboard drivers. I think that's the problem. - `aziz´ Alihan ÇETİN from fftogo

The issue might be that the 2 current drives are in a RAID though they appear separate in Windows (and have done for a long time). So a little confused there. They appear as one in Device Manager though: "NVIDIA JBOD 393.9G". - Kol Tregaskes

I'll grab the latest nForce drivers and give that a go. - Kol Tregaskes

I remember having read about this again (sorry, don't remember where!) an someone mentioned a solution involving XP- installing XP on a partition so you can see the disk and then run the 7 installer, or something like that. - Citronella

Updating the nForce drivers fixed it. Thank you, should have tried that myself. :-) Yippee, 1TB of extra space. Let the games begin. :-) - Kol Tregaskes

Now I need to move my Steam installation to the new drive, hmmm.... - Kol Tregaskes

A few more here: http://www.ebuyer.com/search... Cheapest one for £272. - Kol Tregaskes

I'm leaning more towards a netbook now (over a mobile phone). I'll be able to work on a netbook far faster than I ever could on a mobile phone. - Kol Tregaskes

I think most netbooks run Win7 pretty well. I was running it on a Dell Mini 9 with 1GB ram and an 8GB SSD and it wasn't terrible. Win7 is the first version of windows that's more efficient than it's predecessor. - invariant - farewell FF

Yeah, it's the best OS from Windows. - Kol Tregaskes

I guess I should be happy I own a Asus and simultaneously upset that I own an HP, then. - Miss Elle

Acer is just where I'd expect them to be. Lenovo has gone downhill. - Alex Scoble

It doesn't say how many of those Asus ones are netbooks without hard drives. My guess is netbooks with flash drives would be a lot more reliable than any machine with a hard drive. - Kenton

Kenton, take a look at the netbook stats. Notice how bad they are compared to the other categories? - LANjackal from IM

My Asus netbook has been rock solid for a year now. Nothing has come loose. It's been the same since I bought it. Lenovo is surprising. - Rodfather

I'm surprised at Sony, it certainly doesn't reflect my experience. Although, come to think of it, with the exception of Apple, I've had or managed at least one notebook from each of those brands (Lenovo and Dell many more) over the last three years and none of those numbers reflect my experience. Statistics... - Kenton

In other news, I'm pretty happy with my ol' Toshiba A135. 2+ years, "bargain" machine at the time (<$800), zero hardware problems - LANjackal from IM

I'm not too surprised the the netbook charts. People actually take them out of the house and are mobile with them. Unlike most laptops which stay in the house and sit in the same place. Although Dell netbooks have been reported with build quality issues. - Rodfather

aaaannnddd, this just goes to show that you shouldn't count on having a reliable notebook for longer than two years. - Kenton

I think this says as much about users as it does about the notebooks themselves. I mean, I've got a laptop from pre-2000 (Sony Vaio for those who wish details) that is still merrily chugging right along. One vertical burned out pixel line on the screen but otherwise without flaw. I know how to maintain and care for my machines and can critically evaluate the quality of a premium laptop purchase and sometimes make them. The boyfriend who is on laptop #3 (of the year) just buys the cheapest. - Miss Elle

I agree. Generally if you're good to your machines they'll be good to you. Netbooks probably get tossed around a lot more/worse than laptops do - LANjackal from IM

And dell is roughly in the middle. Hmph. - Roberto Bonini from iPhone

LANjackal. I saw those stats but I wonder what the percentage of it is of HP netbooks with hard drives vs Asus with flash drives. 2 or 3 years ago the only Asus netbooks you could buy were the ones with flash drives. - Kenton

Miss Elle, agreed. If you're going to toss it in the bottom of a bag and bang it around it isn't going to last very long. - Kenton

My ex-flatmate bought a Sony Vaio in late 2007 and within a year of buying it she'd had to have it repaired twice. And she hardly used it, never took it out the house etc. etc. Sony laptops have gone way downhill IMO - Amy

The thing that I can't stand about Asus is that their website is bewildering, with no indication of how to even buy the particular model you're looking at. Browsing it is an exercise in frustration IMO - LANjackal from IM

Amy, my experience is similar with Sony. - Kenton

Yeah I'm surprised to see Sony ranked highly myself, as I've heard nothing but bad experiences about them. Maybe they've changed - LANjackal from IM

http://www.pctools.com/guides... - Victor Ryden

INSHA ALLAH i will be pleased to know that i am vista user but when i use ie8 it does not work while google chrome goes and when use firefox it does not let ie8 work.thank you indeed if you please suggest for me the better browser - Nawabikramullah khan

Give Startup delayer a try. That's what I use to manage startup apps. - Rohit

winpatrol is another good tool to manage all this (and free) - Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)