Computer sagas
The other week one of our computers died. It's the one that lived in the study (OK, garage). It had been threatening to die for some time, and I couldn't turn it off, because it wouldn't turn back on reliably.
Now it was dead. It wouldn't boot up at all! Bambi-like, Windows would start to come up, would get to its knees and fall over! Not always at the same point, frustratingly.
Power supply? Something more serious? I tried booting it off Mandriva Linux, but that didn't work either..
Well, I weighed up what to do.
A new PC would be 350 € upwards.
A Mac would be 650 € upwards (I vowed that the next computer I bought would be a Mac!)
To try and fix it could cost anything from 50 € to 350 €, depending on what was wrong with it (and LOTS of time!).
Or I could just take out the hard drive and put it into a USB box, which would be about 30 €.
That way we would have one PC less, but I could use the disk for the sermon recordings from church, which are LARGE .wav files and have been filling up my laptop rapidly.
So I bought the box to do the tricky surgery.
Then came the weekly shop at our supermarket. They have a section for electrical things reduced to 1/2 price (last of line, etc.) and our TV is also on the blink(!) so I had a look. And there it was:
AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800, 1GB memory, 200GB disk (lots of sermons!) for 250 €.
Providence or Jonah's boat? Well, we had the money, so I decided it was providence. Mrs Davey agreed. And the disk in the box is still useful for transferring files around, and the old PC will either serve for spare parts or be given to a friend who collects PCs to do spare-part surgery with. After all - that PC came to us from another friend.
Not only so but I have fixed the sound on the family computer by downloading the sound driver from the Acer website. Yahou!
Now it was dead. It wouldn't boot up at all! Bambi-like, Windows would start to come up, would get to its knees and fall over! Not always at the same point, frustratingly.
Power supply? Something more serious? I tried booting it off Mandriva Linux, but that didn't work either..
Well, I weighed up what to do.
A new PC would be 350 € upwards.
A Mac would be 650 € upwards (I vowed that the next computer I bought would be a Mac!)
To try and fix it could cost anything from 50 € to 350 €, depending on what was wrong with it (and LOTS of time!).
Or I could just take out the hard drive and put it into a USB box, which would be about 30 €.
That way we would have one PC less, but I could use the disk for the sermon recordings from church, which are LARGE .wav files and have been filling up my laptop rapidly.
So I bought the box to do the tricky surgery.
Then came the weekly shop at our supermarket. They have a section for electrical things reduced to 1/2 price (last of line, etc.) and our TV is also on the blink(!) so I had a look. And there it was:
AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800, 1GB memory, 200GB disk (lots of sermons!) for 250 €.
Providence or Jonah's boat? Well, we had the money, so I decided it was providence. Mrs Davey agreed. And the disk in the box is still useful for transferring files around, and the old PC will either serve for spare parts or be given to a friend who collects PCs to do spare-part surgery with. After all - that PC came to us from another friend.
Not only so but I have fixed the sound on the family computer by downloading the sound driver from the Acer website. Yahou!
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