you can get a drive box for less than $100 if you have a spare hard disk yourself. I have an addonics that is usb2 capable, and a usb2 pcmcia interface card. With 20 Gig in the laptop, and 30 Gig in the drive box I am not going to run out of space or backup capability.

usb is a bit slow if transfering a few GigaBytes of wave files, so usb2 is a great improvement, limited more by the hard disk time than the interface.

I used to use laplink all the time, but find it terribly slow now, and the direct cable connection in windows can do just the simple job of tranferring files just as well.

ethernet is the best cable connection but relatively expensive and complicated to set up. cheapest has got to be a crossover parallel cable and direct cable connection?