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snyiper

snyiper

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Ok I have inherited a 4 yr old dell from my Daughter as she has upgraded to a laptop (thanks to Dad) The Desk top I have looks to have a shot hard drive. I have a clean version of Windows xp which is fine with me. My Question is where is the best place to get a deal on a new/used hard drive? Im putting this in my shop so LOML wont fret over me tracking in dirt to look on here for how to do something...LOL So any advice or suggestions? Im not looking for much heck I remember when 1 gig was gigantic never to be filled!! Yes I know I am dating myself. Thanks for any help
 
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Ok well Ill open it up and see whats there along with how much ram I can add.. It will be later in the week just had 2 eye teeth pulled no so much in the mood tonight...LOL
 
I have a couple IDE hard drives and several sticks of RAM from a past machine ( I just replaced mine) that I would be willing to swap if you are interested. PM me.
 
Dealnews.com

Check out www.dealnews.com

They list sales and deals on hard drives and computer stuff. They also list memory deals. Don't buy a huge drive unless you plan to store lots of movies, video, or 10 billion songs. There are "sweet spots" for memory and hard drives. i.e. drives that are about 500mb are pretty cheap, but 1gb drives aren't much more expensive (@ $79 on sale). Memory is the same way, so just check out what you want. 2gb ram is plenty for xp. That being said..........
Memory and hard drive space are like beautiful burls.........you can never have enough!:wink:
 
I remember when 80 Meg was allot, I even remember when computer did not have hard drives, you loaded the operating system from disk......
 
You could check out www.microcenter.com as well. They sometimes have OEM overruns and you can find yourself a good deal on those.

Don't count on it being PATA if it's four years old. I'm willing to bet that it is SATA if it's four years old. I have a computer that is eight years old and has SATA drives in it. Being in IT, I see a lot of four, five, six year old machines that all have SATA drives. But, check anyways, who knows what Dell might have been doing around that time.

Anyone remember the 8.5 inch floppy disks? I've recently seen things that still take the punch tape. Absolutely amazing that things used to (and obviously still do) work this way.
 
snyiper said:
Ok I have inherited a 4 yr old dell from my Daughter as she has upgraded to a laptop (thanks to Dad) The Desk top I have looks to have a shot hard drive. I have a clean version of Windows xp which is fine with me. My Question is where is the best place to get a deal on a new/used hard drive? Im putting this in my shop so LOML wont fret over me tracking in dirt to look on here for how to do something...LOL So any advice or suggestions? Im not looking for much heck I remember when 1 gig was gigantic never to be filled!! Yes I know I am dating myself. Thanks for any help
Click to expand...

Hey Glenn,
My Dell is about 4 years old too... I haven't had to upgrade or replace the hard drive yet, mine is going strong... but the computer had slowed down to a crawl... I think too much running in the background.... my son came to visit and looked at it and said I need more memory... I only had 512 mb... I bought a new memory stick for 1 gig and put it in one of the slots so now I have 1.28 gig... it's faster, but still think next time I can, I'll get another stick of 1 gig and have 2 gigs of RAM....
Mine also had a roar in one of the fans that sounded like a small Cessna about to take off... while I had it open, I put one drop of oil in the spindle shaft of the cpu fan...I couldn't get to the power supply fan .... immediately stopped the roaring noise.
I had already closed up before I read your post, so didn't look at the hard drive... so can't give any advice there, but strongly suggest adding memory if you don't have at least 1 gig.

You can run a program called cpuid that will tell you what kind of memory and how much you have.
 
timcbs said:
I remember when 80 Meg was allot, I even remember when computer did not have hard drives, you loaded the operating system from disk......
Click to expand...

shull said:
How bout when you loaded a program from cassette tape! )on "PCs" or punch cards (mainframes)
Click to expand...


You guys are just showing off...:biggrin:
But when I worked for a company in Houston, I got a new 80 meg computer... the IT tech told me I would never fill it up so it was plenty big enough.... I have a 60 gig on this machine and it's about 55% filled.. mostly pictures... and I down size most of my pictures.

On the Mainframes... when I lived in CA, the company I worked for shipped electronics... a couple of our accounts were Telex and Sperry Univac... the Sperry disc drives looked like and were about the size of washing machines... the controllers were the size of small refrigerators. We had a warehouse that stored the finished units until they were sold and shipped... the warehouse was about 30,000 square feet with row after row of machines... we had one guy whose job was to go through the warehouse everyday and dust the machines. We shipped one computer from Santa Clara to London from Amdahl to Scotland Yard... the entire computer took up a 40' container... I'm sure it included all the peripherals.. monitors, printers, etc....
The desktops came into being around the mid '70's... a couple of engineers developed one and tried to sell IBM on being the manufacturer... IBM refused and said they'll never take off.. people won't want a computer on their desk....
 
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To insure that you get a compatible hard drive, check out the Device Manager in the Control Panel in XP. That will tell you the type of drive you need. Also, upgrading to 2 GB of RAM is a worthwhile investment as is a 500 gigabyte to 1 terrabyte drive.
 
That is the bad part I cant get it to load the hard drive has some corrupt secters I cant even get to defrag and when I try to backdoor access it it says a fatal error has occured so Ill just pull it and stuff a new one in!!! I will for sure upgrade the ram while in there.
 
Glenn,

check out newegg.com. I just checked to see a little of what they have for an SATA hard drive. They have one for a desktop that is 500GB 7200rpm for $56 with free shipping. It is barebones so you will need your own mounting hardware, but you should be able to use the hardware from your old drive. This particular drive is from Western Digital. Newegg is based in California so you shouldn't have any sales tax either. They also have a Samsung 1TB 5400rpm for $80 (also barebones).

Sorry to hear you're dating yourself. Must be tough when your wife isn't willing to be seen with you in public, but only buying one meal does keep the cost down.
 
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I still have an old transportable Bernoulli drive with 100 meg 5.25 disks.
You bought a five pack of disks and got the drive for free. 20 years
later, I've still never had a disk error on those things although I rarely
use them. They pre-date the Zip drives. Big external drive, though. These
come from the days when it was cool for tech heads to have stacks of
exotic equipment piled up beside the monitor..
 
Is this for the Dell you inherited?
If it is, you can look at the case and get the Dell model/serial number and go to their site. You will be able to find a lot of information without a lot of trouble.
Check the price of replacement Ram with them as well. I was surprised at how cheap I could get some Ram for my wife's older dell. Even NewEgg couldn't match the price I got from Dell.
 
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