HP Pavilion 792 CTO Desktop PC

PM

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(1) BUY THE NEW E-MACHINES!

The T6536 looks great!
http://www.emachines.com/products/products.html?prod=T6536

One of the great things with the AMD Athlon 64 chips is that they have built-in protection against running many known malicious codes! This is in addition to your anti-virus, adware/spyware and firewall programs :)

(2) Don't waste anymore time with the old computer.

(3) Keep the new hard drive you just purchased.

AFTER you get the new computer -- and have it all set-up AND anti-virus, adware/spyware and firewall programs installed and running -- we will first put your OLD "C" DRIVE into the new machine (as the second drive).

You will then run anti-virus and adware/spyware scans AGAIN to see if anything is on the old drive.

You will burn your back-up DVDs of your porn files -- using your NEW computer -- to burn the files from the OLD "C" DRIVE onto DVDs.

Once you verify that your DVDs were burned successfully, you will remove the OLD "C" DRIVE from the second hard drive space in the NEW computer.

Then, you will install the NEW internal hard drive into the NEW machine.

Set the OLD "C" DRIVE aside (use the anti-static bag the new hard drive came in).
AFTER the new system is up and running properly, we can make one last effort to fix the old computer.
But, we'll discuss this as a separate issue later on.

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PM

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At any rate, BigBobxxx, I still have my old computer hooked up (the new computer and monitor are still in their unopened boxes). I've been very busy these last several days.

Regarding the rebooting problem, I did get a new Microsoft Online Crash Analysis that states that the rebooting problem is caused by a video device driver (how accurate their diagnosis is, I have no idea). They offer two solutions:

1.) Install the most current driver for your video card.
2.) Manually decrease Hardware Acceleration for your video adaptor.

They didn't explain how to do either one, however.

BigBobxxx, on a different subject, I have a question regarding monitors, but I'm going to address it in a new thread.

PM

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Right-click on a blank area of your desktop.

Click Properties

Click on Settings tab

Click on Advanced button

Click on Adapter tab

Click on Properties button

Click on Driver tab

If the "Driver date" is way old, you can click on the Update Driver button to try to see if there is a newer version of it. Let the machine connect to Windows Update, if it asks.

Hardware acceleration:

Do the first four things above, then click on the Troubleshoot tab instead of the Adapter tab. Slide the slider over from Full (or wherever it is) to None. (I would update the driver first, and see if that cures the problem, before I would fiddle with this)

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PM

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1. You can sometimes get clues from the Windows Event Viewer. Before my last hard drive died, I was able to see the disk seek errors in the system logs in time for me to copy everything elsewhere. See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308427/

2. All modern hard drives have S.M.A.R.T. monitoring built-in. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Monitoring%2C_Analysis%2C_and_Reporting_Technology. S.M.A.R.T. software was able to predict the impending failure of my boot drive last year. I like either DiskCheckup or Drive Sitter (see Wikipedia section for links).

2. I would never use external hard drives for primary storage (they're good for nearline backups though). Why? For one thing, I've yet to see an external USB or Firewire drive that supports S.M.A.R.T. Another problem is that some external enclosures have little or no configurable power control. So they either run 24/7 or they spin down and up as they are accessed. My Western Digital 200GB drive spins down after about 10 minutes of inactivity (not configurable) and seems to awaken randomly for no good reason.

The final reason is that if anything happens to the bus interface, you'll have to crack the case open and connect the drive up internally to get to the contents. This happened to me (the USB and 1394 interfaces on a Maxtor external drive refused to transfer files at any decent rate). It would take 10 minutes to do a directory listing on the drive. Because the drive was expensive when I bought it and still under warranty, I didn't want to gut the thing or throw it away. It took me a WEEK to run a chkdsk (nothing wrong), copy my files off the drive, wipe the drive, and send it in for replacement.

3. DVD/CD backups are good, but I've read a lot recently about the lifespan of burned discs. Bottom line: not good. You should make more than one copy, preferably on different brands of media. You should also plan to make duplicate copies every few years.

4. My strategy (after losing a lot of old-fashioned porn I had collected...like 6GB worth of good stuff ;) is to make optical backups and keep two copies of important files on two different hard drives. I'm not even worried about the porn anymore...it's irreplaceable stuff like family digicam photos that I worry about. I actually though I had lost about 3 years worth of photos, including wedding pics, when the Master Boot Record on a hard drive was corrupted. Fortunately, I was able to piece together the files through a lot of file recovery utilities and a patchwork of backup media I had copied them to. Very stressful though, especially for Lunacy.

EDIT: 5. Buy drives with long warranty periods (like 5 years). Most retail drives with 1 year warranties are engineered for consumer use. The longer the warranty, the better components and designs they tend to use. Ditto with server-class drives. If your data is important to you, spend a little more on the better warrantied model. It might not guarantee anything, but every little bit will help.

Hope those suggestions help!

Edited by - saki on 8/16/2006 1:09:49 AM

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Write some more reviews, dude!

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I've been procrastinating on disconnecting my old computer and connecting my new one. In the interim, I decided to buy a router with a built-in firewall to better protect my new computer once I hook it up (I decided to have dual firewall protection, one at the router and one on my new computer).

Hopefully, I won't put off switching to my new computer too much longer (since spontaneous rebooting continues to be a problem despite updating my video device driver).

PM

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Good decision to add the router (as a hardware firewall) in addition to your software firewall you will run on the new computer.

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