New Dell Vostro 200 Desktop, here are its' specs:
Processor - Intel® Core 2 Duo Processor E4500 (2.20GHz, 800FSB 2MB L2)
Operating System - Genuine Windows XP™ Home w/Backup OS CD
Vostro Services - Dell Network Assistant
Memory - 1GB DDR2 SDRAM 667MHz
Hard Drive - 160GB SATA Hard Drive (7200RPM) w/DataBurst Cache
Optical Drive - Single Drive: 16x DVD+/-RW Combo Drive w/ Roxio Easy CD/DVD Creator

I had posted an earlier topic on this forum concerning upgrades to this system, and I thought that as configured as is would be fine for it's intended use, in the following order:
Web surfing, word processing of sensitive info, photo work.
Minimal, if at all gaming or high end audio interfacing, it has just integrated graphics and sound capability, yeah it's a cheapo.
This system has not been powered up yet, I am in the process of upgrading it to what I think it should be, i.e. adding another hard drive and RAM, simply put, I am a frequent buyer from NewEgg, however I am not a geek, by any standards.
I have already bought and received additional RAM (Kingston MEM 1Gx2 KST 240P KVR800D2N5K2/2G %) and am awaiting another, supplemental hard drive (Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3250410AS 250GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s
Will I be able to keep the existing RAM and still run the RAM modules originally equipped? would this be counterproductive?
As for the hard drives, XP is already loaded onto the original drive, Office 2007 will likely be added, should I load this onto the original drive?, or the supplemental one?
RAID1 is the only option on this sytems MOBO, I will probably not use it, unless anyone suggests that I do, I am open to suggestions.
Partioning a drive is Greek to me, should I do this for both drives?
As usual folks, Thanks in advance !

I did some research on you RAM situation and it looks like the memory in there should take up one or two slots. You have four available so there should be no problem adding them in. One thing to consider is that the current RAM is PC-5200 which is a little slower than the PC-6200 that you bought. The computer will automatically down grade the faster RAM to the slower speed

As for you HDD situation, If you got the second HDD to increase the space in your computer then you will want to add it as a secondary drive in Windows and format it with NTFS. Also If you go this route install Office on the same HDD that windows is installed on.

If you wanted it for a continuous backup then turn it into a RAID 1(Mirrored Drives).But do note that this may slow down system performance a little bit because windows has to write everything to 2 drives.

I don't know of any pieces of software that will allow you to create a RAID setup with an external disk. WHy do you want to use an external disk?

my sugestion would be to take the external enclosure apart and add the HDD as another internal disk. If you break the mirror(e.g. the firewire cable becomes disconnected) then you in a whole load of crap. also another ting to note is that you may have to reformat in order to set all of this up.

WHS while the idea of RAID was for servers it has since been used in many desktop PC's ... But it only protects you from a hardware failure of your disk. If you have a software failure the RAID will not help you. In fact it will just multiply the error.