Time for an upgrade

In my opinion, the hard drive option is the best.

It will aid your boot times greatly, and everything will be faster (loading games, booting into Windows, etc.), desktop speed is actually dependant on the hard drive speed more than anything else, so everything around the operating system will seem MUCH faster.

You can use Norton Ghost to make an image of your drive, yes.

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In that case, I'd get the Western Digital Caviar Black 640GB drive. They're amazing - faster than any other drive in the Caviar Black range (Except the Caviar Black 2TB) due to the size of its platters: 2 320GB platters, instead of 250GB platters in every other drive, except the 2TB, which has 4 500GB platters. The reason this matters is that it has a higher data density than most other drives.

And I'm not 100% sure - I've never done it before. You should maybe look at a guide or something. I don't want to say anything with the risk of not being right.

http://ghost.radified.com/

That should help (I think).

Whatever you decide to do, good luck!

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Exactly what I would have said. The WD Black is hard to beat in terms of speed and size.

I believe the SeaGate 500GB 7200.12 Drives are just as fast as these drives, but obviously they're smaller in terms of capacity, and SeaGate drives (generally speaking) aren't as reliable as Western Digital.

You can't go wrong with the Caviar Blacks.

I'd say go for it. Either that or the HD upgrade are your best options. I actually saw a 4890 go for 90 bucks on craigslist in my area about 2 weeks ago! I know it was a steal but I didn't really need/have money for it at the time