formatting

I just put together a new computer (AMD 64 X2) with a 500 gig hard drive and lit it up for the first time. Everything ran just fine, so I though I'd throw a copy of Win XP on it (don't worry, it's a legal copy). Well, it's been about three hours and the hard drive STILL hasn't finished...

I'm calling it quits on my laptop but not ready to spring for a new one (I really only need it for word-processing, storing/printing pictures, a little spreadsheeting, a little powerpointing, some mild 'net surfing, and playing the occasional game. For a long while now I've had virus and worm...

I have a bunch of text ebooks (mostly from Gutenberg) that have hard-coded carriage-returns after each line. I want to remove them but I'd be forever doing it manually. I tried in Word (replacing all paragraph marks with space and then replacing double spaces with paragraph marks) but that...

Ok,here's a tricky one.......well for me anyway.I need to format and partition a hard drive for a computer.The drive has to be on a controller card.It's an ATA/100 running on an old PCI ATA/33 MB,hence the controller card.Can this be done?I'm not sure how the BIOS will recognize the controller...