The external hard drive should have a USB port and cable to connect it to your PC or laptop. This is known as plug & play. Your system should recognize the newly added device. Now, to format the drive: If you have a guide that came with the drive, I would recommend looking through it. One thing it will tell you is whether or not the drive has already been formatted and how it has been formatted. You will need to figure out what you want to do with that drive. You can leave it as a single partition, or divide it into two partitions. If you plan on connecting the drive directly to your Windows system, you want at least one FAT32 partition on that drive. Windows XP can read both FAT32 and NTSF volumes, so if the drive is pre-formatted FAT32, you can leave it alone.