"Pain, Captain."

[elfs]

Last night, Omaha and I got home after a long flight and went to bed. This morning I woke up only to discover that something had gone horribly wrong with my desktop computer. There's a 5 month old Maxtor 120GB drive on there with all of my MP3s and so on, and no backups, and both of the drives on the IDE0 channel are refusing to respond to requests from the motherboard. The IDE0 channel has given me headaches in the past; this is the second drive in as many months to go south on IDE0/A, so I suspect it might be something with the motherboard. It's a six-year-old computer, and it's done many a good thing, but if it can't be relied upon, well... *sigh*

Unfortunately, this leaves me only with the laptop, which is still solid as a rock and very reliable after all these months. I'm so happy with it I just wish it had a hard drive worthy of its power-- it's a little 6GB thingy.

I'm pricing through the catalogs right now, looking for something to replace the old Linux box...

Elf

Comments

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

Try this (http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?c=us&cs=04&kc=6W463&l=en&oc=dim455i). Once you go through and deselect all of the useless options, it ends up as ~$500 after rebate.

[johno.livejournal.com]

If the laptop has USB 2.0 or, even better, firewire, you could add the big drive as an external to the laptop and have the extra storage there.

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

It does sound as if it is the motherboard, but have you tried a new IDE cable? I have, over the years, had s couple of problems which were fixed that way.

Sometimes it is the cheap things.

[fallenpegasus]

I agree. Nothing hits home just how much trouble you can get in from cheap IDE cables as deploying a few thousand PC-like boxes to people's living rooms.

Replace the IDE cable. And get a good one, not just another cheap flat grey ribbon.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'll try that. I suspect, though, that it's really the power supply. Everyone I've spoken with tells me that the new Maxtor's are (a) powerhogs and (b) power-sensitive. It's a five-year-old power supply: any bets on whether or not between the Maxtor and the CD Burner there's an understandable degree of power fluctuation in the system?

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

I could build you something, if you wanted.... might save you some bucks to re-use bits you've already got...

If you want something off-the-shelf in a hurry I recommend ComputerStop on Northup (20th St) in Bellevue (alternate store on Aurora)... I think they'll even preinstall Linux for you if you want'em to.

[kenshardik]

If I were in the market for a new PC, I'd be looking at Cheapass Computers. They seem to be using quality components - the "Ninja" uses the MoBo that I'd build from scratch with - and the prices seem good for nicely-powered systems.