Our family computer is dying a slow and agonizing death. It has never been a great computer, so to prolong it's suffering, I have recently added a DVD/CD Writer drive and doubled the RAM memory, thanks to Pops retiring his old desktop machine. I hoped the increased memory would help the computer be more stable and not glitch as often, but the problems have persisted.
So we started thinking that the hard drive must be freaking out. It was also sitting at 90% full. Yesterday I picked up a new hard drive. It has a lot more storage space than the old one, but it had a $50 rebate that made it one of the cheapest drives in the store.
I had to run back over today, to pick up a PCI host card. Once I got the card installed, getting the drive up and running was pretty straightforward. Except that I can't boot up the computer from it.
Meaning that it is basically useless, even though I spent about 5 hours trying to figure it our today. So here I sit, with my loud dying 40 GB hard drive spinning away. At least I have a nice back up of the old drive, now.
If anyone wants to give me some advice on getting this thing to boot up, feel free.
12 years ago
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4 comments:
I learned to build my own computers from scratch,so I'd be happy to help with any tech questions you have.
Shannon
That is the way I want to go next time. Can you save any $ that way?
I've heard that freezing a hard drive in a ziploc bag (overnight?) can resurrect it long enough to copy data off of it. A google search should help with figuring that out.
It was definitely cheaper for me to build one than buy one. But mine is very custom, for what I wanted to do with it. If all you realy need is a basic computer for internet and solitare, then it might be cheaper to catch one of those "$199-$299" deals that companies like Gateway or Dell offer.
Shannon
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