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August 21, 2005
It's Dead!
Well, Kira made it safely to college and seems to be doing well so far. My trip to Anderson went well. The trip back had a minor detour around a really bad accident on the back roads between Pelzer and Fountain Inn. The most annoying part of the detour is that by the time we made it around, they had started letting traffic go straight through.
Yesterday while fiddling around with my computer, one of my hard drives died. Luckily it was the older 60 GB drive which I've been using mostly for the tivo-like pvr functionality of my computer and storing lots of tv shows, most of which will be out next month on DVD. I've yet to try to recover the data. The most entertaining thing to come of the crash was the need to re-authenticate XP because my hardware had finally changed too much since I bought XP. Yes, I actually bought XP.
In the wake of the disk failure I immediately backed up all of my pictures to the laptop. Those and my years of web pages are really the only thing I care about on the computer that isn't already backed up somewhere. Next I went out to search for a new hard drive. I was already lacking in the space department, but I've been trying to hold off until I could buy SATA drives..which means upgrading the motherboard. Even though it was only 60GB of most likely lost files I needed to replace it with something. I ended up ordering a pair of WD 320GB drives which I intend to set up in a RAID 1 configuration (this will be my first venture into RAID.) The new drive will more than doubles my total amount of disk space pre-failure.
So now that I have a new hard drive duo, video card, 512MB more RAM (I went ahead and got that with the HDs), monitor, and tv card I don't see me upgrading the rest of the computer any time soon. Maybe I can start putting that money somewhere else..at least until the motherboard blows up.
Posted by mhader at August 21, 2005 7:52 PM
Comments
I've been eyeing a new motherboard\cpu upgrade dreamily lately. SATA hard drives were what pointed me in that direction too. Lately I've been looking into those "home theater" cases and have been really impressed by how much you can get for a relatively small sum in today's market. I'm currently planning to hold off until next summer if possible and do a complete upgrade of everything, but if prices keep dropping like they have lately I'll be lucky if I can stand to wait until Christmas. :)
How much RAM does that bring you up to in this computer?
Posted by: Ben Roller at August 21, 2005 10:07 PM
I agree. It's fairly cheap these days to set up a nice system. I was planning to upgrade the beginning of next year, which would be 3 years after my last upgrade. With all my recent purchases I'll likely be waiting until at least next summer as well (although I really want a second system to play around with things like MythTV). My P4 2.4Ghz is still holding up just fine for what I do on a day to day basis. My only concern is that my motherboard is literally falling apart and may not last another year, although I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
The new 512MB stick will be my second, so I will have 1GB of RAM. I think that will make my computer happy. I run far too many memory hungry programs. A clean install would probably help it out a bit..but I like the top 5 culprits of memory usage.
Posted by: michael at August 22, 2005 1:14 PM