lessee, you have an 8 year old mac. How big is the drive? How big was the drive in the laptop (and think about physical size too)? As the density of data increases, the odds of failure increase for any given format. Yeah, we all have 500 MB drives sitting around that will still run. Wanna use them? The idea that you can get 40 gigs of data on a drive barely larger than a credit card is still unbelieveable. Different drive makers push the envelope with their manufacturing and sometimes that doesn't work too well downthe line. Dell, being one of the biggest PC companies out there seem to get more failures because they have more PCs out there. Sometime they do cheap out or have a bad design and it bites them. Dell had a problem with motherboards a few years back and wound up taking a $150M charge-off for warranty work. Oh, and as I recall, when MAC had all the battery troubles, they were real quick to point out THEY did not make the batteries.