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I've found that drift alignment is great if you're already pretty close to being polar aligned, but somewhat painful if you're waaay out. Other methods can be much easier and faster.
If you're running EQmod, then software such as AlignMaster will be much faster at getting you very close to polar alignment. It gives you pairs of stars to choose from - it slews to the first one, you centre it, it slews to the second one, you centre it again, it intentionally moves the star off-centre, finally you re-centre it by using the polar alignment knobs. Doing this about 2 or 3 times usually puts me within about 5 arc sec of PA.
If you're just using the SynScan hand controller, I believe that the latest firmware upgrade has the AlignMaster-style polar alignment tool built into it. There have been a few threads on it here...
One other thing - it *really* helps if you can make sure that your mount is level. Don't trust the bubble level on the EQ5 (unless you've calibrated it) - they're infamously bad.
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