[SMHarman]

Well after a frustrating time trying to get the HDD to be discovered in the old PC, the answer Maxtor require you remove all jumpers for it to be a slave (or Politically correct Secondary) device, otherwise it is Primary or Cable select. It came shipped as Cable Select. Pulled that out, as gateways online techs had confirmed the PC supports 136Gb and off it went. Maxtors support software is fantastic. I was going to order the Samsung spinpoint as recommended above but somehow clicked and bought the Maxtor. Seems pretty quite.

Discovered why the old PC is so quite, the only fan is the power supply one, it blows on a big metal heatsink on the processor, so quiet.

Router - I got the Linksys WRT52G (version 1.1 was shipped with most recent firmware). Plug and Play... Powered everything off plugged it all in powered up in order and away it went.

Next problem was the XP machine (and the w98) refusing to see each other in the OS. The would ping etc. Searched for the PC and it found it. Currently backing up lots of data, cool.

Questions I have left at the moment.

The router has NAT and Firewall. So can I disable the firewalls on the machines behind it. They are at the moment, so they can see and talk to one another. AV is still running on the XP machine. None loaded on the W98 machine at the mo. If it is not browsing or e-mailing does it need one? I could even use the router to block it from the internet i suppose? Thoughts?

Is there some software I could run on the clients or file store to sweep for new/modified files in certain folders, say MyDocuments and copy them onto the backup drive?

Thanks all for your help. The warm backup will be fantastic in helping me sleep at night as all Mrs Hs clients in progress accounting invoicing etc are now backed up.