« You can be creative without a Mac? | Main | Well, they certainly don't wear turtle-neck jumpers »
September 12, 2008
Delaying the inevitable
Image via Wikipedia
My desktop Windows XP machine has been thrashing the hard disk a bit lately - notice how the machines feel tuned and fast when you don't use them but when you do, they feel like molasses? Ananda's first rule of Windows machines, that is. Dentabox ended up starting from scratch, I was trying to avoid that. I'm eyeing that 750Gb Samsung for AUD 100 but I have all these older hard disks, lying around not used. So I mounted a 160Gb Seagata PATA, copied data off my main 120Gb Seagate SATA, used Easus Partition Manager to resize the original volume, took deep breaths and crossing of fingers as it did and luckily, I'm back, typing on this machine. I re-selected various options for the Windows Paging File, ensured that the machine was biased to assigning more memory for Programs, and so far, the impact has been positive.
But 750Gb sure looks kinda nice to have. As does the Dell 24inch LCD. As does a new battery for the workhorse notebook. Or a new notebook...
In the meantime, Brandon tells me there will be a Mooncake Festival celebration at the Victoria Market on Sunday. Hmm, photo op.....
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_a.png?x-id=b7b0aa16-d424-4d93-a7e2-39c886aebed4)
Posted by Anandasim at September 12, 2008 04:23 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://bleedingedge.com.au/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1607
Comments
The only 750Gb Samsung for AUD 100 that I know of are in a certain Green Guide advertisement that has been running since about the end of June. Since about the end of June I've tried phoning and visiting a few of their stores. For a month or two they were "not yet available" and then they were "out of stock, no more coming". The people there are quite happy to immediately start the upsell on other brand drives for about 50% more cost...
Posted by: ajft ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://bleedingedge.com.au/blog/nav-commenters.gif)
at September 13, 2008 05:59 PM
Yes, I had the same treatment, so that's why I put in extra effort and am enjoying my three older smaller capacity hard disks. However, CPL have a Samsung listing - haven't tried those. The Seagates (which I am partial to) are 50% more expensive, possibly because they have 32Mb of cache....
Posted by: AnandaSim at September 13, 2008 06:58 PM
Hi Ananda,
"enjoying my three older smaller capacity hard disks"
So do I, I have six or seven external HDs.
Used to run them in USB enclosures, but they are expensive so I only had two of them and swapped the HDs as required.
Got sick of it, (plus the fact that the power supply of these boxes generates a lot of RF interference, bad enough to make listening to some AM stations impossible.)
So I bought just the IDE-SATA to USB cables and mounted all the drives in an old tower with just a power supply and a USB hub.
Now all seven are on when I need them, and no more noise.
The speed is quite good actually.
Cheers
Posted by: lomaca at September 16, 2008 08:15 PM
It is in the air...
Grabbed 4GB RAM and a couple of spare 160GB drives and added them as a RAID1 array to the current PC with a spare SATA RAID Controller I had.
Reboot from DVD and install Windows 2008 Server to the new array and imported my old Vista x64 machine so it now runs as a virtual machine in Hyper-V.
Once all the last little things are moved/migrated from my old Vista install to the new Vista VM I can turn it off and delete it.
Posted by: Stephen at September 17, 2008 12:13 AM