Computer Issues

We have three PCs work­ing here at the moment, but only two that most of the fam­i­ly mem­bers can real­ly use. There are five peo­ple in this house who are avid users. There are fre­quent­ly oth­ers vis­it­ing. Eeep! (Yes, we had more PCs here, but we also had friends who lost their PC due to a light­ning strike, and the thought of them being iso­lat­ed with no net con­nec­tion was sim­ply too much for us to bear.)

The third one does­n’t like Windows—any ver­sion of Win­dows. It had so many hard freezes that we final­ly turned it into our Lin­ux box and it runs for months on end hap­pi­ly as a file and print server.

Yes­ter­day one of the two Win­dows machines, Appren­tice, decid­ed not to talk to his hard dri­ve any­more. First I got a mes­sage that there was­n’t an oper­at­ing sys­tem present. Then there was anoth­er error mes­sage that I’ve for­got­ten now. Then there was a hard dri­ve I/O error. While it would boot from a flop­py or a CD, it would freeze up right afterward.

Last night the machine sud­den­ly decid­ed that all was well—no, I did­n’t change a thing (I was dis­tract­ed and had­n’t yet got­ten around to pulling it apart). I’m back­ing up the data files on it now because I don’t trust it at all. It’s an Ema­chine that was giv­en to the kids, and the IDE con­troller is inte­grat­ed into the moth­er­board. It does have one more PCI slot open, so I can try stick­ing a new hard dri­ve con­troller in there if I must. Blech.

When you upgrade your com­put­ers, remem­ber us! We here at Tech­no­Zoo promise to pro­vide a lov­ing home to your out­dat­ed hard­ware. We’ll love them and use them and appre­ci­ate them and you can even vis­it them!