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

I may (or may not) have mentioned once or twice that our desktop computer started slowing down last summer. I'd bought it in February or March of 2006, so it was obviously nearing the end of its life, taking forever to boot up, etc. It wasn't a top-of-the-line model when we bought it, but neither was it totally low-end... but these things wear out, and ours was clearly starting to.

We'd been talking recently about what to replace it with- but hoping to wait to do so till after we move (which will have to be within the next few months, as the lease ends in April) so we had one less thing to worry about packing and unpacking, not losing or having stolen or broken.

But since that power outage we had last year, it's taken to making an odd whining noise, presumably one of the fans, like a turbine on a jet that's readying for takeoff. Shutting it down for a bit always helped. Until last Sunday, that is. After that shutdown, it sent up some kind of distress message on the monitor (we didn't actually see what that said) and wouldn't boot up again. According to the diagnostic lights on the front, the problem is a bad memory module, but having pulled all the memory modules out and trying every possible combination of module(s) and slots, it appears that the motherboard is bad.

The laptop is fine for backup, but it's also rather old and a very low-end model (it belonged to my late mother, and she didn't even use it for accessing the internet, only for record-keeping). After a week of that, I was losing my mind, so on Monday we had to go buy a new one.

I hate shopping the day after christmas, but this was sort of an emergency. So now I have a shiny new toy. And one more expensive thing to worry about moving without losing/ breaking/ etc. It's becoming clear that for this move, we're going to have to hire professionals (and just move the very valuable or extremely fragile items ourselves).

Anyway, once again, we didn't go with the cheapest model, but neither did we go totally high-end (especially with respect to graphics cards- no need for all kinds of overclocking when we're not hardcore gamers, and play mainly on gaming consoles anyway). I did spring for a nice 23" monitor, though, since it was on sale...

Sadly, while most files were stored on an external hard drive, the databases for our Collectorz.com software weren't (we didn't get the external hard drive until after I'd installed), so we'll have to start bar code scanning the books/ movies/ music collection from scratch unless I can retrieve that info from the old hard drive.

I can help you to push buttons!

You can push all the buttons you like. On the *old* one.

But ....


.... I likes new shiney buttons

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Shiney buttons are all nice and 'oooh-aaaah', but if it don't got knobs and dials to spin and twiddle, it just ain't really techy.

How-ever, if it runs without any Harrier's taking off in the back-ground, and does all you want, then yayyy's and whooo-hooo's, Ms PC. Happy 'puting!

...why can't you install the old HDD in the new machine as a slave? Or in some other machine?Or failing that - find someone who offfers data retrieval?

If it's only the mofo board that's bad the hard drive should still work.

I'm sure the hard drive still works- I just don't have another machine with a working board to put it into so data retrieval is going to be the best alternative. I don't know of anyone offhand who can do it, but I'm sure I know someone (taking it to a random stranger is not an option, as I have used it to work from home and there may still be protected information stored).

Don't want to put the old hard drive into the new machine until I can confirm there's nothing particularly wrong with it. I'll obviously hold on to it, when we take it in for recycling, they'll make us remove it anyway. I'm also going to scavenge the DVD drives and the floppy disc/ various card reading thingy. This machine only has a single DVD-RW drive but an open port where I can stick a second one, and I did like having two. The other ones, I can probably offer up to someone on Freecycle or something. No point recycling something useable.

If there's no rush, I ain't that many miles away. And have an old PC-tower with a DVD-burner that could just bulk-copy what-ever your old drive has.

There's bound to be a non-random, non-stranger. Failing that - there are kits for transforming an IDE drive into USB.

I don't think you could do any harm plugging it into your new machine - although I can see why you might be worried about warranty. Is it sealed up? Do you have a service/warranty condition that requires you to go to the supplier to stick new kit in?

Here's my old machine, btw. Note the snazzy HDD 'bay'!

http://bonoboworld.blogspot.com/2008/01/ghost-of-old-machine.html

Yeah, it's a sealed machine with a one-year warranty, so I'm not keen on the idea of going into the case till after that's expired. I may not even get around to installing a second DVD drive into the expansion bay till after then.

Conversion to a USB sounds like a good idea, though. That's how the external hard drive we have already connects, obviously. We could actually remove a lot of stuff from that drive and use it merely for maintaining those Collectorz.com files, or at least get the files up and upgrade my software to include web storage.

All that said... I don't remember what size hard drive we had before, it was one of the larger ones available at the time we bought it, but we only had 1G of RAM. The new one isn't a gamer's wet dream or anything, but it has 8G of RAM plus 1G for the graphics card. It's a 1TB hard drive. Between that and the 1TB we have in the external HDD, that ought to keep me busy for a little while. Those extrnal drives have gotten dirt cheap- we saw a 3TB one for under $300!!

I did exactly that with my daughter's hard drive from her crippled laptop. I took it to a service tech who tested the drive. After he confirmed it was accessible, he installed it into a carriage that had a usb output. We plugged it into her new laptop and she was able to move all her files over. And this was from a pc to a mac, we were impressed.

Did a google. Seems they're inexpensive.

I'll definitely look into going that route, then!

Sorry you couldn't rescue your old PC, but glad you found a new one so fast.

Thanks, Bel!

We went shopping as soon as feasibly possible. We'd considered ordering another like last time, but this is fine. We may upgrade the laptop in a few months too.

I failed to notice, however, that there wasn't a speaker integrated into this monitor, so no sound till this weekend. My uncle offered us a pair of his, we'll see what those look like, I suspect they'll do fine and we can keep an eye out for something else once we find a new place.

We'll want to start upgrading the hi-fi then, too...

My wedding present from my techy man was a set of speakers for my PC, they're really rather cool with a seperate woofer erm thingy. They wee all over the old ones.

oooh new shiny stuff PC!
Ed's suggestion sounds like a good one, used various similar things at work in the past. if it is still functioning you can use it as an extra back up drive as well.

Magwitch - I'm not entirely sure that weeing speakers is a safe idea

To be honest Icky, I think that was the only thing the old ones were good for