[netyuppie]

yea, glad it was the hard drive and not the processor. will read the tweak guide, got plenty of time as newegg probably wont ship till monday. thought i took pretty good care of my machine but i'm gonna make some changes, as this past week has been pretty annoying.
i've always gone WD, this drive was too. will see if its completly gone once my new drive arrives. will reformat this one and see if i can't use it as a non-system drive. whats the highest capacity raptor out there now? few years ago i had 2x 74gb Raptors in a RAID1 array as my system drive. liked that but was having problems getting the RAID to work with my new MB. actually still have them...might try setting that back up and use the 2 drives i just ordered as storage. choices, choices!
thanks for the help folks. for anyone still interested for future reference, i will post back once i try to reformat this drive and see if it works any better.