Jim Wilkins wrote:
"Michael A. Terrell" ? wrote in message
m...
? ...
? I started to backup my hard drive this morning to an external 1 TB
? Seagate Free Agent drive. The backup program ran for about 30 seconds and
? the system crashed. The hard drive died, and the external drive is
? trashed, so I may have lost everything. Seagate doesn't recognize the
? serial number as valid, even though that ST31000528AS drive is only a
? couple months old. I pulled the drive and tried it in an external housing
? on another computer. It ran a couple seconds and disappeared from the
? list of drives. Seagate wants a report form their Seatools program, but
? you can't get one if the drive isn't seen. ...
FWIW, the Iomega USB-powered drive I use for first-line backups has crashed
twice when run off a BUSlink Cardbus USB hub in the laptop. Both times I
moved it to the laptop's built-in USB ports where Check Disk fixed it at
bootup, then it ran fine for hours. Neither ASC Disk Doctor nor HDTune can
find any problem with it.
The oldest, least valuable PC I own that can still (Feb 2011) function on
the Net is a 933MHz Dell running Win2000 and IE6, with AVG v8.5 antivirus
and the Zonealarm firewall. The same programs clog a 500MHz laptop. This
1.6GHz D610 laptop with XP SP3 and IE8 dates from 2005 and is fast enough
for Comcast broadband, though at home I have dialup.
Thanks, Jim, but I do have other computers I can get on line with. I
need this system to do some projects on, the others are all too slow.
It's biggest fault is the size. SFF and need low profile cards for the
two PCI slots.
IOW you don't need to spend much on an older computer to get online. The
only issue I've had with used office machines has been their limited mobo
video and lack of AGP or PCI-E slots to upgrade it. I got good-enough HDTV
results from a Radeon 9250 in a plain PCI slot.
I run mostly retired business computers. I get them for free, but a
lot are too old to fool with, or like the one Vista computer I have,
barely have enough RAM to boot. I had to buy 4 GB for it, and it needs
more than the 120 GB HD it has. I haven't seen too many SATA drives yet,
and most act like the Seagate that just bricked. The computer doesn't
see it, and you can't boot the computer if it is used as a secondary
drive.
I had a nice 21" HP CRT monitor with 1536*2048 resolution, but the
flyback failed. I could have four normal web pages open, or a page & my
web tools all at the same time. I really miss that monitor, and all it
cost was gasoline to bring it home. The county IT office was pitching
it, since it had been replaced, and none of the qualified charities
wanted it. They called a Catholic thrift store that collects computer
stuff for me, who gave them my phone number. I picked up a full pickup
load of stuff that had to be disposed of, but was never claimed. That
monitor had a bright green display when it was first powered up. I
left it on a few hours and it looked better. Then I ran the auto
calibrate a few times and it looked great.
The Netscape software I'm using right now ran fine on a 500 MHz
Etower with 32 MB of RAM. Current programs want more than that for
simple programs.
--
Politicians should only get paid if the budget is balanced, and there is
enough left over to pay them.