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Pastimes : Dream Machine ( Build your own PC ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Zeddie88 who wrote (13614)	8/6/2002 1:59:35 PM
From: PMS Witch	1 Recommendation Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 14778

Computer #1 presents the easiest problem for me: I know nothing of Win2000 and must let others offer their opinions Computer #2 sounds like a catastrophic hardware failure. The presence of smoke hints at a power supply problem. If so, new power supplies are reasonably priced and easily installed. If your disk is not supplied with power, your system cannot boot. This is just my guess. Your motherboard works well enough to display the error message: an encouraging sign. Sniff around inside the box. Burnt stuff looks awful and smells worse. As well, the disk may have gone up in smoke. Back-up . . . If I were considering a back-up system, I’d take a good look at external CD burners that plug into the parallel printer outlet. You could use it with any PC. Each CD holds over 600meg and blank CDs can be purchased at reasonable cost. Since a compressed image will occupy about half the original space, ten CDs will back-up a full 12gig drive. Another solution that looks interesting is an external disk drive. I’ve seen them in flyers from computer centres. They consist of a box, power supply, cabling, and software. They are aimed at people who have upgraded their storage and don’t want to throw out their old drive. The idea is that one puts their old drive into the box and they have a backup that is fast and portable. They cost about $100, without any drive. I have no experience with these. Being able to store entire disks on one tape makes this solution the easiest to perform backups. Unpleasant duties are first to be skipped, and swapping a dozen or so CDs isn’t appealing work. The drawbacks to tape systems: expensive media, expensive hardware, and tapes can be annoyingly idiosyncratic. Can you backup one system to the other? This may be the easiest solution. Cheers, PW.