h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I bought a 4TB hard drive a some months ago which was on sale at a very tempting price (which I can't remember now, but it was very good) because my other drives are starting to stretch and creak at the seams (and if any of this sounds familiar... F50359?thread=8312988 ). I hooked it up to one of my external enclosures ready to format it... disk management says it's only 1.6TB.



At first I thought that my OS couldn't see a 4TB drive (I'm not sure why I thought that... maybe because XP had problems with drives over a certain size), but in the end it was nothing more than an older docking station which can't see drives bigger than 2TB. Oh, okay, I guess I'll have to buy a new one of those

So I put it to one side and mostly forgot about it, except each morning when I get a daily email from a certain online computer parts retailer (the very one I bought the drive from) telling me what they have on sale.

This was nearly six months ago. It took me until yesterday to remember that I have a spare hard drive bay in the computer which I haven't been using because the power cord that came with the motherboard only has five connectors, and I already have three hard drives and two DVD drives installed (the second DVD drive is for my British region 2 films).

Oh well, I'll unplug the region 2 drive, use that connector for the new hard drive and see what happens.

Result Now I have 10TB of storage on the PC. If I want to watch The Bargee, or Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush, or Loot, or Entertaining Mr Sloane, or a handful of others, I'll just have to unplug the region 1 drive. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

Congraduations.

I had a little scare with my computer.


I sat for 25 minutes last night watching my laptop not start up. I recently "upgraded" to WinTen. I wasn't sure if it was actually stuck, or maybe updating. I've heard people complaining about the massive updates eating up their DATA budgets on limited IP services. Anyway, after 25 minutes of watching the little blue HD light flicker and nothing but a grey screen, I hit the power button. It rebooted in the blink of an eye, comparatively (about 3 - 4 minutes ). After start up, it gave me a notification that my backup had failed. Long ago I set it up under Win7 to do backups each Sunday morning, but as I never bothered to plug in my external drive, it only did it once. So, I plugged in the external and clicked on the notification... Well?... is it actually backing up? I had no idea. The light on the external was flashing for quite a while. But then it stopped blinking, actually the light was off. So, I unplug it.

ERROR!!! Danger Will Robinson!!!

Yep, Backup Failed! There was never any dialogue box to tell me it was actually running a back up. No place for me to check progress, cancel or pause it. Nothing but that blinking and then dark LED.

I plugged it back in and got it started again and then it warned me that it would erase my previous backup from Win7 and suggested I move or copy that one. I do so and then, I guess, it completed the backup around 2:30 this morning.


BTW... I also made clone copy of my entire main HD with CloneZilla. I highly recommend anyone thinking of upgrading to Win10 to do likewise.

I highly recommend anyone thinking of upgrading to Win10 to call the emergency services and request a visit from the men in white coats carrying a straitjacket, because you'd have to be barking mad to want to do it.

I did it on my laptop. Aside from less pleasing aesthetics of it, it ed the thing up good proper Every time I plugged in or unplugged the power cable it triggered an error message that was something to do with the graphics card which I never got to the bottom of. It would sometimes (and sometimes not) minimise my windows upon waking up. It would sometimes close all my windows while it was asleep. It was even slower than my laptop was before (which was very slow). Very useful context menus for certain things, like wi-fi connections for instance, weren't there any more. And a whole bunch of other stuff my memory seems to have expunged because the experience was so awful.

And when I decided to go back to Windows 7 (which, I found out you can only do for a month, after that you're SOL , and I reckon I must have just got in under the wire), the laptop threw a serious wobbler for a few days. If I hovered the cursor over *anything*, whether a link on a webpage or the 'Open new tab' icon, multiple instances of whatever it was would open... and some of them would close, without me doing a thing. Do you have a mouse with a clickable middle wheel? And do you know how if you click the wheel a little scrolling icon appears so you can scroll up and down the page just by moving the cursor? That would appear unwanted and unclicked every couple of seconds and send the page flying up and down willy nilly, making it virtually impossible to read any page at all.

I also had to reinstall a handful of plugins, one of which was Flash, and that finally seemed to bring the laptop back to its senses. As far as I can tell it's working normally again.

If the laptop was a child, what happened to it was like being sent to live with the Addams Family for a month and coming back home a traumatised wreck.

I'm not an enthusiastic convert to Win10. I won't be surprised if it craters my laptop. So far, it seems to be working, albeit slower. I haven't delved into it much. I typically just web surf.

I've got that clone so my data is relatively safe. (Is there any reason one couldn't just reload a clone after 1 month? Will MicroShaft bork your Win7 via it's license or something?)

If it does crater, I might just use that as an excuse to buy a new laptop. I'd like to go back to mostly using Linux. This laptop stopped running Ubuntu a while back. I could try running a scaled back Linux like Lubuntu. I just don't know if I can load it on top of my borked Ubuntu partition. If I get a new laptop, I can start anew.

Every few years I face a computer replacement and worry about losing my old email archives, but other than that one Email from The Digital Village :// inviting me here 16 years ago, I really haven't actually wanted any of my old email. And considering the prices of good laptops these days, it's not that painful anymore to upgrade computers.



For no good reason, click this link.

http://wap.h2g2.com/

Yep, buying a new laptop these days is far less stressful mentally and financially than it used to be. I'm going to take a guess that a lot of kids who'd automatically have bought one a few years ago just stick with their phone now and don't bother with a PC of any kind at al. Why would you need one when all you do is Twitter, FaceAche, Snapchat and Spotify, and send a bucketload of texts every day? I haven't seen any numbers but I'd imagine that laptop manufacturers are seeing a drop in sales, or at least a slowdown in the increase, and could be offering some pretty good deals, added to which the performance of computers now is... well, I've got as much RAM in my laptop (4GB upgraded from the 2 it came with) as the entire hard drive in the desktop we had when I got to Texas in 1999, and even that's looking a bit out of date now with 8GB of RAM becoming more common in laptops and 16 in desktops (I've seen deals for 32).

The desktop is a different matter. I've built my last two, and although this one has a few issues I'm sticking with it for now because it does everything I need it to, and with Win7 Pro. The laptop has Win7 Home, so I might take advantage of another set of good deals - OEM versions of Win7 Pro which have suddenly plummeted following the release of Win10.