and 2 x 1 TB harddrives in mirror raid to protect against drive failure. How to backup that 1TB of data will be answered in a future installment of Ask Slashdot.
That's easy. Get another 1TB drive in an external enclosure. Copy everything from the tower to the external drive. If the data is particularly valuable to you, consider buying several and stashing in multiple locations.
Of course, 1TB may be massive overkill. Most of these storage mediums are only going to have a few hundreds of kilobytes to a few MB of data each. Likely you'll only have a few GB of data max when all is said and done so you'll easily be able to make lots of copies of it on multiple media formats to insure it'll be safe.
Ugh. A VIA chipset from that era is going to be flakey and won't like many PCI devices or loading up the PCI bus. A Gigabyte board from that era will almost certainly be suffering from the bad caps problem. I would avoid that models like that if at all possible.
You're best bet would probably be a Slot 1 Pentium II board with plenty of slots available. I have a good one here - a Tyan S1680 from 1997. Baby AT format with 5 PCI slots and 4 ISA slots, 512MB of Ram in eight 64MB ECC 72 Pin simms (that must have cost a small fortune back in the day!), and a 300Mhz PII processor. Enough power to run a modern Linux distro or Windows XP (slowly, but it'll work good enough for what you want), but also old enough that it'll run Dos/Windows 3.1/Windows 95/NT4 and there should be drivers for it.
Provided you can find a ZIP drive that hasn't clicked itself to death.
Go find some office where the Zip drive was standard equipment on every computer, but no one ever used them for anything. I've seen a few. Hundreds of zip drives, only a few ever actually ever saw a zip disk. Only problem is that most of the machines from that era have probably been retired by now and scrapped(*), so you'll have to poke around in some dusty closets to find ones that are left.
(*) Their notorious unreliability may help you here. As the first of the Zip-equipped PCs were retired, prudent IT guys would remove the working Zip drives to have spares for the few machines where they were used. I've seen some impressive stacks of lightly used Zip drives in some storerooms.
I wouldn't consider that unusual at all. If I can get to somewhere by car in 8 hours, I'm not even going to consider flying. I'm not going to save any time or money by flying, and the amount of hassle and stress is far lower.
Funny you mention USB2, as Apple was one of the last manufacturers to adopt USB2 over the original USB (at the time they were still pushing Firewire heavily). Anyway, I think the poster was refering more to a lot of the propriety stuff Apple pushed back in the 80's and 90's.
Upgrade copies of Windows will also do a full install on a bare harddrive. It'll look for a copy of Windows on the drive to verify that you are eligible for the upgrade, but if it doesn't find it will ask you to insert the install CDs and verify it that way( admittedly, this likely won't work with most recovery disks). Some older versions of Windows Upgrade CDs would do a turn into full install CDs if you knew a "secret" product key to disable the check.
The confusion seems to stem from the fact that with Windows, you have three options: Upgrade, for people with a previous version of Windows, OEM, for computers without Windows where the copy of Windows becomes tied with the physical hardware, and Retail which can install on a blank computer and can be moved to another computer and gets you some additional support options. OSX only has one option, which behaves like the Windows full Retail disk, but in terms of licensing, it's like the Upgrade disk - it can ONLY be used on a computer that originally came with OSX. Since you can't buy a Mac without Mac OS, the OSX upgrade disk can skip the annoying previous OS check - the fact it's an Apple computer is good enough.
They "killed" nuBus once PCI finally came along and was mainstream. Before that, nuBus, which they invented, kicked @ss over the PC's crappy bus, which was slower and didn't allow for plug-and-play -- you had to move address jumpers on the cards before you installed them.
It's not like the PC didn't have a superior bus to ISA either, IBM had the MCA bus that solved many of the problems with ISA and was even superior to NuBus in some ways (it was faster). However, being a propriety technology with steep licensing fees, it never really caught on as everyone but a few stuck to the free and open ISA bus, so it died a very similar death as NuBus.
Well, I think that Steve's comment about all the new camcorders using USB for the past 2 years is particularly telling. He saying that he pretty much considers something as little as 2 years old as ancient and obsolete and should be replaced. Given how most of the Mac fans I know replace their computers a lot more than the PC people, and the general inability to upgrade most Macs, I can see how someone might consider the rabid Mac fanbase as somewhat wasteful.
And besides, what websites do you visit that don't run right on a 2005-era machine? That's what my computer is roughly like (it's actually a 2002-era machine with some upgrades), and it works fine for pretty much anything I throw at it.
It's kind of amusing really. Finally, most every new PC starts shipping with a Firewire port, Apple starts dropping them from their line up. Hopefully Apple will drop DVI next, in order to get the PC makers to make that standard.
I had an electric shaver that had a non-removable battery. It was clearly designed so that the battery wearing out would be the EOL for it, as it otherwise was fine even by the time the battery couldn't hold a charge long enough for a single shave. Using it with the charging cable hooked up to it didn't work as it would only run off the battery (the power switch also disconnected the charging circuit). I tried to take it apart, but like the iPod there was no clear and obvious way to take it apart so I ended up destroying the thing in the process. And the battery was soldered into place anyway. I learned my lesson and replaced it with a model of a different brand that wasn't a cordless model (no battery).
Only because you think that the majority of consumers will ever care about half of those features.
That's irrelevant, really. The fact that it plays MP3's and costs half as much as an iPod is all the features it needs to make it attractive to the majority of consumers.
Or don't have any common sense. If the computer uses twice as much power under load than when idle (on the high side, especially for an office machine), and it takes a long 15 minutes for the computer to start, you would be saving power by turning them off unless "overnight" is 30 minutes or less.
That's actually a good reason to power the drive down often. Stiction is one of those problems that gets worse over time. If my drive spun up fine today and spun up fine yesterday, it's likely it will spin up fine tomorrow. If stiction rears its head, it will be fairly easy to coax the drive into working if the problem has just started, and I'll know to get a replacement asap. If the drive hasn't been spun up in a while, it's a total crapshoot whether or not it will work when it's powered up, whether it's been spinning the whole time or sitting on a shelf. Overall, I've lost more data from drives that have been left on all the time as opposed to drives that I regularly power down, as I can catch the "about to fail" drives when they start having trouble when I power them up.
A lot depends on the brightness setting of the monitor, for both CRTs and LCDs (assuming the brightness setting of your LCD adjusts the brightness of the bulb, which is true for most of them nowadays). 30-50W is about right for a 17" LCD. CRTs tend to dim with time, so their power usage gradually increases, assuming you turn up the brightness to compensate. LCD backlights are also supposed to dim with time, but I haven't noticed that yet, except in cases where it dimmed right before it failed completely.
And your right about the power usage argument, I tried running the numbers hoping that I could argue that my LCD would pay for itself. It would have taken something like several years of 24/7 use for that to happen. Generally it seems to be best to squeeze the most life out of existing hardware no matter the efficiency than to run out and replace it with something else because it uses less power.
Another solution would be to use the WOL feature that most computers have nowadays. That would have the bonus that you could manage it centrally rather than having to set up each computer individually and have the ability to easily change the settings for holidays.
On the other hand, if you're not going to use WOL, then one way to save power would be to reconfigure the computers to turn WOL off. I've never understood why so many computers have this feature enabled by default, wasting power when the computer is "off", when it is so rarely utilized.
If they have something like Symantec Anti-virus on there, that'll do the trick as it seems to love to grind the disk for a good solid 5-10 minutes after booting. A high-end machine doesn't help either, as the thing ties up the disk the whole time so nothing loads (well, maybe a SSD would help). It's even worse if they are still on Windows 2000, as it makes W2K's already slow boot take excruciatingly long.
That doesn't even make sense. What are aliens going to do with a bunch of dollars? Everyone knows that Earth fiat currencies are essentially worthless once you leave Earth. And if these aliens were to try to spend them on Earth, what are they going to buy? Fossil fuels? How quaint.
The talking point being thrown around is that she "exceeded expectations", which I don't disagree with. But this isn't the second grade, where everyone is a winner and Palin gets the "Most Improved Award". This was the VP debate, the future of the nation is at stake, and I'm rather tired of people giving Palin participation points just for showing up. The fact is that Biden soundly defeated her, which was obvious to anyone who watched the debate, and that's what the polls show (well, except perhaps at Free Republic or something).
I don't disagree with you about the Democrats. Their attitude helped them lose the 2004 election which should have been an easy win for them, and I don't put it past them to screw this one up too (voting irregularities in the swing states aside).
All you would have to do is find a complex like the one I'm in that has detached garages. The garages have electricity to power the garage door opener, and it's not worth the trouble to try to meter the individual garages so the landlord picks up the tab on those. Hence, free charging! Only problem is, you only get 110V and I bet you can't pull down much current either.
Slashdot Mirror
and 2 x 1 TB harddrives in mirror raid to protect against drive failure. How to backup that 1TB of data will be answered in a future installment of Ask Slashdot.
That's easy. Get another 1TB drive in an external enclosure. Copy everything from the tower to the external drive. If the data is particularly valuable to you, consider buying several and stashing in multiple locations.
Of course, 1TB may be massive overkill. Most of these storage mediums are only going to have a few hundreds of kilobytes to a few MB of data each. Likely you'll only have a few GB of data max when all is said and done so you'll easily be able to make lots of copies of it on multiple media formats to insure it'll be safe.
Gigabyte Ga-6Vtxea
Ugh. A VIA chipset from that era is going to be flakey and won't like many PCI devices or loading up the PCI bus. A Gigabyte board from that era will almost certainly be suffering from the bad caps problem. I would avoid that models like that if at all possible.
You're best bet would probably be a Slot 1 Pentium II board with plenty of slots available. I have a good one here - a Tyan S1680 from 1997. Baby AT format with 5 PCI slots and 4 ISA slots, 512MB of Ram in eight 64MB ECC 72 Pin simms (that must have cost a small fortune back in the day!), and a 300Mhz PII processor. Enough power to run a modern Linux distro or Windows XP (slowly, but it'll work good enough for what you want), but also old enough that it'll run Dos/Windows 3.1/Windows 95/NT4 and there should be drivers for it.
Provided you can find a ZIP drive that hasn't clicked itself to death.
Go find some office where the Zip drive was standard equipment on every computer, but no one ever used them for anything. I've seen a few. Hundreds of zip drives, only a few ever actually ever saw a zip disk. Only problem is that most of the machines from that era have probably been retired by now and scrapped(*), so you'll have to poke around in some dusty closets to find ones that are left.
(*) Their notorious unreliability may help you here. As the first of the Zip-equipped PCs were retired, prudent IT guys would remove the working Zip drives to have spares for the few machines where they were used. I've seen some impressive stacks of lightly used Zip drives in some storerooms.
I still found all that paper took up too much room. So I ended up scanning everything into the computer and burning it to DVD :)
I wouldn't consider that unusual at all. If I can get to somewhere by car in 8 hours, I'm not even going to consider flying. I'm not going to save any time or money by flying, and the amount of hassle and stress is far lower.
There have been several completed acts of terrorism in the US since 2001.
Fixed that for you. The Anthrax mailings? The DC snipers? The smiley face bomber? How quickly you people forget.
Funny you mention USB2, as Apple was one of the last manufacturers to adopt USB2 over the original USB (at the time they were still pushing Firewire heavily). Anyway, I think the poster was refering more to a lot of the propriety stuff Apple pushed back in the 80's and 90's.
Upgrade copies of Windows will also do a full install on a bare harddrive. It'll look for a copy of Windows on the drive to verify that you are eligible for the upgrade, but if it doesn't find it will ask you to insert the install CDs and verify it that way( admittedly, this likely won't work with most recovery disks). Some older versions of Windows Upgrade CDs would do a turn into full install CDs if you knew a "secret" product key to disable the check.
The confusion seems to stem from the fact that with Windows, you have three options: Upgrade, for people with a previous version of Windows, OEM, for computers without Windows where the copy of Windows becomes tied with the physical hardware, and Retail which can install on a blank computer and can be moved to another computer and gets you some additional support options. OSX only has one option, which behaves like the Windows full Retail disk, but in terms of licensing, it's like the Upgrade disk - it can ONLY be used on a computer that originally came with OSX. Since you can't buy a Mac without Mac OS, the OSX upgrade disk can skip the annoying previous OS check - the fact it's an Apple computer is good enough.
They "killed" nuBus once PCI finally came along and was mainstream. Before that, nuBus, which they invented, kicked @ss over the PC's crappy bus, which was slower and didn't allow for plug-and-play -- you had to move address jumpers on the cards before you installed them.
It's not like the PC didn't have a superior bus to ISA either, IBM had the MCA bus that solved many of the problems with ISA and was even superior to NuBus in some ways (it was faster). However, being a propriety technology with steep licensing fees, it never really caught on as everyone but a few stuck to the free and open ISA bus, so it died a very similar death as NuBus.
And I suppose that adaptor will also magically make your FW400 port run at FW800 speeds?
Well, I think that Steve's comment about all the new camcorders using USB for the past 2 years is particularly telling. He saying that he pretty much considers something as little as 2 years old as ancient and obsolete and should be replaced. Given how most of the Mac fans I know replace their computers a lot more than the PC people, and the general inability to upgrade most Macs, I can see how someone might consider the rabid Mac fanbase as somewhat wasteful.
And besides, what websites do you visit that don't run right on a 2005-era machine? That's what my computer is roughly like (it's actually a 2002-era machine with some upgrades), and it works fine for pretty much anything I throw at it.
It's kind of amusing really. Finally, most every new PC starts shipping with a Firewire port, Apple starts dropping them from their line up. Hopefully Apple will drop DVI next, in order to get the PC makers to make that standard.
I had an electric shaver that had a non-removable battery. It was clearly designed so that the battery wearing out would be the EOL for it, as it otherwise was fine even by the time the battery couldn't hold a charge long enough for a single shave. Using it with the charging cable hooked up to it didn't work as it would only run off the battery (the power switch also disconnected the charging circuit). I tried to take it apart, but like the iPod there was no clear and obvious way to take it apart so I ended up destroying the thing in the process. And the battery was soldered into place anyway. I learned my lesson and replaced it with a model of a different brand that wasn't a cordless model (no battery).
Only because you think that the majority of consumers will ever care about half of those features.
That's irrelevant, really. The fact that it plays MP3's and costs half as much as an iPod is all the features it needs to make it attractive to the majority of consumers.
Why Apple refuses to make any iPods that run on a regular AAAs I'll never know.
That's part of their plan to keep from competing with themselves. A lot of people find it easier to replace the iPod than to replace the battery.
Or don't have any common sense. If the computer uses twice as much power under load than when idle (on the high side, especially for an office machine), and it takes a long 15 minutes for the computer to start, you would be saving power by turning them off unless "overnight" is 30 minutes or less.
That's actually a good reason to power the drive down often. Stiction is one of those problems that gets worse over time. If my drive spun up fine today and spun up fine yesterday, it's likely it will spin up fine tomorrow. If stiction rears its head, it will be fairly easy to coax the drive into working if the problem has just started, and I'll know to get a replacement asap. If the drive hasn't been spun up in a while, it's a total crapshoot whether or not it will work when it's powered up, whether it's been spinning the whole time or sitting on a shelf. Overall, I've lost more data from drives that have been left on all the time as opposed to drives that I regularly power down, as I can catch the "about to fail" drives when they start having trouble when I power them up.
A lot depends on the brightness setting of the monitor, for both CRTs and LCDs (assuming the brightness setting of your LCD adjusts the brightness of the bulb, which is true for most of them nowadays). 30-50W is about right for a 17" LCD. CRTs tend to dim with time, so their power usage gradually increases, assuming you turn up the brightness to compensate. LCD backlights are also supposed to dim with time, but I haven't noticed that yet, except in cases where it dimmed right before it failed completely.
And your right about the power usage argument, I tried running the numbers hoping that I could argue that my LCD would pay for itself. It would have taken something like several years of 24/7 use for that to happen. Generally it seems to be best to squeeze the most life out of existing hardware no matter the efficiency than to run out and replace it with something else because it uses less power.
Another solution would be to use the WOL feature that most computers have nowadays. That would have the bonus that you could manage it centrally rather than having to set up each computer individually and have the ability to easily change the settings for holidays.
On the other hand, if you're not going to use WOL, then one way to save power would be to reconfigure the computers to turn WOL off. I've never understood why so many computers have this feature enabled by default, wasting power when the computer is "off", when it is so rarely utilized.
If they have something like Symantec Anti-virus on there, that'll do the trick as it seems to love to grind the disk for a good solid 5-10 minutes after booting. A high-end machine doesn't help either, as the thing ties up the disk the whole time so nothing loads (well, maybe a SSD would help). It's even worse if they are still on Windows 2000, as it makes W2K's already slow boot take excruciatingly long.
Well, you can't vote Bush out if there is no election, so McCain=Bush is the only one that really makes sense.
That doesn't even make sense. What are aliens going to do with a bunch of dollars? Everyone knows that Earth fiat currencies are essentially worthless once you leave Earth. And if these aliens were to try to spend them on Earth, what are they going to buy? Fossil fuels? How quaint.
The talking point being thrown around is that she "exceeded expectations", which I don't disagree with. But this isn't the second grade, where everyone is a winner and Palin gets the "Most Improved Award". This was the VP debate, the future of the nation is at stake, and I'm rather tired of people giving Palin participation points just for showing up. The fact is that Biden soundly defeated her, which was obvious to anyone who watched the debate, and that's what the polls show (well, except perhaps at Free Republic or something).
I don't disagree with you about the Democrats. Their attitude helped them lose the 2004 election which should have been an easy win for them, and I don't put it past them to screw this one up too (voting irregularities in the swing states aside).
All you would have to do is find a complex like the one I'm in that has detached garages. The garages have electricity to power the garage door opener, and it's not worth the trouble to try to meter the individual garages so the landlord picks up the tab on those. Hence, free charging! Only problem is, you only get 110V and I bet you can't pull down much current either.
The grocery may not take them, but if you bring them to a bank and they determine they are real, they will replace them for you.