Yeah, I have done quite a bit of shopping at Compusa during the past 12 months only to find out this past weekend that they are closing down a large percentage of their stores nationwide. They will only have 103 stores left and none in southern California. The closest ones to me will be in Santa Barbara and Bakersfield. As a Sales and Marketing Professional I really have to question whether or not that was a good decision. Still they will be operating over the net.

It looks like there has been quite a slow down in the computer sales field and some companies are doing a shake out. Apple said its sales was down 30% over the same period last year. Still they do this damn rebate scheme instead of straight up business.

If the rebate comes through the Maxtor item you pointed out to me is a good deal. Thanks for the effort. I will check it out before the stores close.

You are absolutely correct! I went to the Anaheim store looking to buy the Maxtor and they wouldn't honor the rebates. I could but it for $110.00 or online.

I do have one empty enclosure for a drive and could buy a bare drive. It has USB2 for an interface and so that could be another choice but I did like the idea of just buying a completed unit and plugging it in.

As far as LaCie goes there are only some basic parameters that are available with a browser and TCP/IP is not one of them. To do that I would need to hack into the the system. It is possible and there are some articles on it on the net but it would be a lot of trouble. They don't want users messing around the inards and won't help.  So messing with the tcpip timing etc its not in the works.

I'll do a little shopping on pricegrabber et al and see what comes up. Maybe I'll get lucky. If not a completed unit then a large drive to put into the enclosure I have empty.