Personal computing is still the saga of annoying problems, but not all of them are caused by the hardware or software. Sometimes they're caused by you.
A few months ago, my home system, then running Windows ME, began to have irritating periods when the disk drive seemed to talk to itself, hanging up anything else that was going on. Well, Windows XP1, which was said to be much more stable, was installed, but the problem didn't go away.
From time to time, the system would freeze. And there were errors being written to the hard drive.
A check of cables and such found nothing loose or wobbly, so maybe the drive itself was getting flakey. That sometimes happens, and sometimes it can be cured by the new-style EIDE ribbon cables that contain 80 wires, giving its own ground to each of the 40 connectors.
So, off to CompUSA for a couple of new cables, and hey, while we're at it, a new 40-gigbytes Western Digital hard drive for less than $100.
Because Windows XP wants to do the formatting of the new drive itself, much fussing and swapping of cables until the new drive is the primary master drive, the CD-ROM is the primary slave, while the suspect drive becomes the secondary master and a puny 2-gigabyte drive becomes the secondary slave.
And guess what
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Dirk van Ulden said:
Dirk van Ulden said:
Dirk van Ulden said:
CoastalBoy said:
cube_corner said:
Better hurry up and increase spending soon! We can't allow a surplus.
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