Bought a hard drive  

It seems that today the computer stuff price really decreases than before. I remember my portable hard disk is 40GB but it cost the similar price as your hard drive right now. So I think it is worthy to buy it. 500 GB just sounds great!

That is a good price to pay for all that storge capacity. About £65 British pounds.
I paid more that that for a 250gb internal hard drive and put it in an external caddy.
That was three years ago and it has done me proud.
I use a virtual pc system which runs off the external hard drive.
Computers within computers. I have about 10 virtual computers on this external hard drive.
One for internet, chatting, email, myLot writing online articles that sort of thing.
Another for scanning text or pictures, another for Media, watching streamed TV, playing music.
One for file sharing,one for Ebay, one for processing art and pictures,even a couple of Windows 98SE to run a few older applications.

Oh and several Linux PC's.

It works great, faster start ups, freeze the pc just where you wan, reboot and all your open applications are exactly where you left them.
I can pick it up, plug it into another machine, run the software and within half an hour I have my own PC up and running, no istalling software or finding discs. As long as the Host PC has internet access, I can log on and away I go.

I have wrote a couple of articles on the Helium website regarding Virtualisation if you are interested.

Check out the link from my The Tao of Blog link on my myLot profile.
(It is a right pain this not being able to cut and paste links)