I've managed to reformat the new HDD (twice the size and faster rpm than the old one).
Installed WinXP (boot time 25secs)
Installed SP3 (boot time 30 secs)
Installed security* and lappy drivers (boot time 60 secs!!!)

Anyway, I've decided to downgrade from Office 2007 to 2003, since the newer version ran too slowly on my current laptop. But I need to import all my messages and settings from the old HDD (forgot the 2.5" hdd caddy so have to play swapsies). Will there be any problems with my saved emails given that I'm gonna be using different versions of outlook?

Also, with firefox, I can export/import bookmarks, but I also want to copy my saved forms/passwords/history etc - ideally without the use of third party add-ons as this will compromise security (IMO). Any ideas?

just copy the entire profile folder across

it's in %appdata%\mozilla\firefox\profiles and it'll be a lood of random letter with '.default' on the end copy the contents of that into the relevant folder [it'll have a different bunch of rnadom letters] on the new drive and it'll copy all your bookmarks... settings and whatever over

EDIT IIRC you can't go backwards from outlook 2k7 to 2k3

If you save your outlook fiules ina 2003 format PSD you should be ok I bounce between 2007 and 2003 with no problems.

Yup I tried to import PST files into outlook xp - wasn't having it, but there was no problem with outlook 2003.