I have been riding for about a year and a half. The f4i is my second bike. I had an f2 before and never dropped it. My dad did once because he didn't know how to take it off of the stand it was on. Needless to say the f4i isn't under his care. I have had dirt bikes and motor scooters when I was younger and never dropped thouse ether. I guess I'm just a perfectionist. :p

Hmm... it's up to you... but fairings are usually expensive. Rather than spending on those, you could focus more on the renewable parts such as CCT, FPR, Fuel filter, air filter, which will be due eventually. :)
(mine also a 2001, need to replace a lot of stuff bcoz they are simply too old)

I just replaced my right side lower fairing and upper cowl and all I have to say is that it is EXPENSIVE. I dropped the bike in my driveway and it ripped the blinker staulk off and ruined the upper and scraped up the lower. I tried to find used fairings over the winter with no such luck. I am a perfectionist so I bit the bullet and bought OEM replacements. If you are dead set on getting a lower fairing definitely go with OEM if you want to replace just one fairing, the ebay fairings will not line up with OEM and the color will be off. The cheapest I could find for the lower was about 400 bucks from cheapcycleparts.com.

I also was looking to replace my upper cowl and left side lower fairing. I emailed the guys at extremefairings.com and they will sell just single parts from what I remember. This was a couple months ago. It was def cheaper than going oem but still ended up being about 300+ which is almost the cost of an entire new set from them. I'm saving up and am just going to buy a full new set and part out the stick oem stuff which is still in good shape.

Sorry, I have been away from my bike for a couple weeks. I moved and I hopefully will be getting my bike back tomorrow. I would love to go with OEM but it is so expensive! I guess for now I will just keep looking on ebay for parts. Thanks for the input!