Re: Reviving a Dead Laptop

Somewhere on teh intarwebs "John Doue" typed:
~misfit~ wrote:
Somewhere on teh intarwebs "John Doue" typed:
shrewprincess wrote:
Wow, thanks guys, that's a lot of responses really fast, and very
much appreciated.
[snip snip snip]
For the HD, indeed 10G is not much, but as long as you limit your
usage to Internet, and Word processing (word 97 ideally, but no
2007!), you should be fine. Bigger disks are cheap (I have plenty,
could send you a bigger one, say 60G, for the cost of USPS, end
February if you are still interested). On most machines, this is
easy too, ... once you have found the way to access it.

Damn but that's nice of you John! I wish I was female. ;-)

What difference would that make ? :-) Lots of "double entendre" here,
hope you can take it!

With KY? ;-)

More seriously, my experience is, in the US, drives 60G or under, even
in mint condition, barely fetch the cost of shipping and I refuse to
have anything to do with Ebay. So I would prefer to give it than to
throw it in the recycle bin the day I decide to clean my ... drawers
(I keep my garages for cars, must be an exception!)

I was bidding ona 10GB drive on our Trademe and was leading up to $20 when I
gave up. It's now gone up to $35 and there's still 32 hours of the auction
to run!

There are 20GB second-hand 2.5" HDDs with "buy now" prices of $38. Crazy
when you think that new laptop HDDs with warranties (in New Zealand) are
around 50c / GB for laptop drives and 20c / GB for desktop drives.

Alas, the smallest new HDD I can source is 80GB (and that's closer to $1 /
GB being non-mainstream).

I have a Dell
Latitude CPi PII/400 / 128MB / 4GB (the PII "Dixon" CPU, the best
CPU Intel made bar none pre-Coppermine) that I still find very
useful (using a hybrid OS of Win 98SE and ME called 98SE 2 ME I
believe). It plays xvids just fine and the battery's good for a
couple hours still. I also use it to play some of my old favourite
games, AOE, Dungeon Keeper, Diablo, Command and Conquer and the
like. I get a perverse thrill from using and enjoying something that
others would throw away. Unfortunately the HDD is too small to fit
all my games from that era on so I find myself backing up saved
games and installing and uninstalling often.

Do you remember a program called Stacker that would compress whole
drives? It would double your capacity. I might still have the
diskette!

Hehee! Are you seriously suggesting disk compression on a machine that's
already 'punching above it's weight' so to speak? The CPU overhead would
kill any extra storage capacity advantage. Also, it is my experience that,
although disk compression programmes claim to be able to double your
capacity that is a 'best case' scenario. Usually, again IME (on older
machines), if you're lucky you can trade 50% CPU overhead for 20% extra
drive space.

I'm in New Zealand and, when I look on
our version of ebay (Trademe) it seems that ~10GB lappy HDDs sell
for nearly as much as new 40GB drives. I doubt the machine's BIOS
would 'see' anything above 32GB

I doubt it too.

.... and to be honest I couldn't see any reason to go above ~20GB on a
machine like this anyway.

I suppose the shipping to NZ would make a gift uneconomic anyway.
LOL, I'm staggeringly poor, yet just before Xmas I gave away an
nForce2/Ultra400 mobo, an (unlocked) Barton XP2500+ and 2 x 512MB
RAM in dual-channel config to some random guy who was posting in
nz.comp and was having trouble getting things to work on an Athlon
1.2GHz PC system he was trying to put together for his daughter.
Heh! It was even fitted with a really nice Thermaltake HSF with an
8cm fan.... Gosh I'm good at digression!

Indeed.

:-)

Take care!

You too John.

Cheers,
--
Shaun.


.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Identical systems
    ... > most hardware and comes up with the network running. ... > If the drives aren't identical you can do approximately the same ... > the disk bootable yourself. ... If you only have a handful of machines with exactly identical ...
    (Fedora)
  • RE: Disk Wiping Utilities
    ... Mr. Daniele and I have disagreed on the finer points of this topic in the ... comes with the download for secure disk erasure is nothing short of excellent. ... it should be followed up with exactly what John mentioned in his ... Drives that house data ...
    (Security-Basics)
  • Re: Stress testing and TIMEOUT - WRITE_DMA
    ... >> I was seeing this kind of messages last time, my disk died after 3 ... Only one of these machines managed to spit 81 errors at me over a period ... warnings after approximately 8 days after installing FreeBSD. ... the drives are pretty much brand new. ...
    (freebsd-stable)
  • Re: twa driver, 3ware 9500s-4lp, speed issue
    ... > disk needed to be powercycled. ... I'd probably replace the drives by a different make or at least model; ... the earlier 36 GB Raptors at any rate - check storagereview.com why. ... > new machines and will be replacing the old 3wares in the older ...
    (freebsd-current)
  • Re: Beware Doing a CHKDSK in Fix Errors Mode
    ... Do the same with the Dell. ... >> disk diagnostics available. ... >machines that have the same problems. ... Why not run the diagnostics and ease your mind about the drives? ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.general)
Loading