Any internet store that's either in Europe or will ship there or as local PC shop that sells notebook HDD. 9.5mm high by 2.5" wide is the physical size you need. Not sure what the MAX GB capacity is you can use in that model but a 40GB one should work.

In Belgium. I have seen several internet shops in the UK but none of them ships to continental Europe...

whereabouts in europe are you?

hmm, wonder if dabs will do it?

http://www.dabs.com/fr

Thanks for the information. However, they do not ship to Belgium. I found some other shops that do it.

I want to be sure that what is happening to my computer is that the hard drive is broken. I tried to run the dell diagnostics. I did several times in all there was a different problem... the reason was always the same: the operation timed out. Besides, there are strange noises in the right hand side of my computer; it shuts down also from time to time and it does not always find the operating system when I Start the computer again. Is it the hard drive that is failing?

Finally. My actual hard drive is an IBM Travelstar with a 4200 speed. Is it worth upgrading to a faster hard drive in a three year old Pentium III?

Regards,

Dario

I'm not an 'expert', but that sounds symptomatic of a HDD problem to me.     As far as the increased speed, I think you'd find it worthwhile if your normal useage is disk intensive.  (games/accessing large databases/file swapping).   If you don't d/l large files though and are simply doing word processing or web surfing and such, you could probably do without it.   My theory has always been if it isn't much more expensive; buy the better one! 

DavidinNC