Reading a post like yours makes me SO glad I have a Macintosh. I can just plug my external portable hard drive (which is 20 gigs and is the size of a deck of cards and doubles as an MP3 player, address book , calendar and game machine) into the firewire port on my Mac and it immediately appears on my desktop. I just drag whatever I want onto it. I didn't have to configure it, download drivers, etc. Just plug and play