It seems like I'm always running out of space on my hard drive. All those digital photos and trips to the iTunes Music store, I guess. At any rate, when I got a new 17 inch Powerbook a few weeks ago, I wanted more than the 100Gb that is offered by Apple. So, I downgraded it to 80Gb to save a little money and ordered a 120Gb drive (5400 RPM, Seagate). When the new PB arrived, I didn't even turn it on--just cracked the case and put in the new drive. There's a great site, called PBFixIt that has step-by-step instructions with photos for replacing almost any part on your Powerbook. They also sell parts. Their instructions for replacing the hard drive were excellent.

Once the new hard drive is in, you have to partition and format it. The installation disks that come with the Powerbook have an option, that I'd never noticed before, to do all of that using OS X's excellent GUI-based DiskUtility. Just boot from the CD and then select DiskUtility from the pulldown menu. In a few minutes, I was installing OS X from the disks and had 55Gb of free space. Now to find something to fill it with...