Abstract: This is a system and method of organizing secured purchasing groups (SPGs) to reduce costs and risks for both buyers and sellers by forming binding purchase offers and by selling in volume. The method includes authoring a first buyer to establish an SPG with the buyer's own terms of purchase. Other buyers join the established SPG if they agree to the terms of the SPG. As the established SPG interests more and more buyers and enlists the buyers to become a member, it attracts potential sellers to sell to the buyers of the SPG. A binding purchase contract is established when a seller makes a commitment to sell to a buyer of the SPG. A deposit is required from both the buyer and the seller to deter fraud and to reduce risks. A secret code system helps further reduce fraud and disputes. A user rating system further encourages good community behavior. The results of the rating system are used throughout the system.

Abstract: A modified driver program for an external hard disk drive for a personal computer which manages a cache in RAM on the motherboard to speed up disk access operations is disclosed. A block of 2000 bytes contiguous to the driver code is reserved at boot time. An "on/off" data byte flag is managed to indicate whether the data in the cache is valid. For read operations of a size less than the size of the cache, a number of sequential blocks of data from the disk are stored in the cache. Any write operation potentially invalidates the cache data so the flag is set "off". On subsequent read operations, if the cache flag is "on", the driver code compares the contents of the cache to the requested data to see if it is stored in the cache. If it is, the data is read from the cache as opposed to the disk thereby speeding up the access.