320 GB WD drive at Best Buy, 7200 RPM, $75. WTF.
Now, you must understand, when I was a computer technician, cloning someone's boot drive was a pretty easy process, even after the switch to Windows 95. Win95 was harder because you had to use a special technique in order to make it work, but it was still basically just copying the entire contents of one hard drive to another. You could do most of it in Windows itself, in fact.
Before Win95 it was even easier, because DOS was pretty transparent with its boot sectors and partition tables and such. You did all the stuff to get DOS on the hard drive and then just issued a command like "XCOPY C:\*.* D: /S", and then walked away and took a little break while the entire contents of the first drive were copied to the second drive. Easy-peasy.
Not so with Windows Vista.
No, because Vista uses some weird new method of setting up the hard drive for booting, something overly complex which doesn't make sense to me. The utility which is provided with Vista for partitioning and formatting hard drives cannot make a bootable partition--at least, not as far as I could tell!--and so I had to go find software on-line which would clone the contents of my C: drive to the new one.
I ended up having to do the copy three times: first a file copy in Windows, which failed; second a clone operation in "XXClone", which also failed; and third, a clone operation in "DriveImage XML", which worked, after some finagling.
There doesn't appear to be any software out there--at least not freeware--which can just automatically take the contents of one bootable drive and copy them to a new drive and make it bootable. I had to fiddle a bit, though the fiddling was not very difficult to accomplish.
So it took many, many hours to accomplish what should have been a relatively simple task. *sigh*
Anyway, so now I've got the new hard drive in, and I spent my afternoon and evening playing World of Warcraft. I guess that's a "win".
At least, I hope it is.