Have you set the Bios to boot from HDD0?
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What\'s for you won\'t pass you by
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Well, yes and no - it normally looks first at the floppy, then the CD, then the HD. I did try putting the HD at the top of the list, but with no perceptible change.
However, all is now sweetness and light in the BJ household, as I discovered that the behaviour was due to my temporarily using the power connection for my second CD driver (a writer) to run the new HD (which I didn't want to install properly until it was working!). This had the effect, not seen by me before despite having done this sort of thing fairly regularly, of putting the BIOS in a flap, as the second CD was still connected, just not powered.
Why didn't I use the power connector from the old HD, you ask? Because it was extremely tight and inaccessible! Still, a useful lesson to me and further proof, if proof were needed, that more haste yields less speed. Quite literally, in fact.
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BTW, I can now unreservedly recommend the drive, a Seagate Barracuda (ST3160023A) with 8Mb cache, currently available from Maplin for just under £70. It is blissfully quiet, too.
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Further re bootup.
It's more rare these days to use a floppy to reboot a system, so it's more general to set the Bios to boot from CD first (in case you have to use an XP installation disk for instance), then the hard drive and finally the A drive.
If you set the A drive first, CD second and then the hard drive, the system takes time searching in turn for each before booting up.
It is, of course, straightforward to (temporarily) reset the sequence in the Bios if you do need to use a floppy or CD for any reason.
By the way, Seagate hard drives are excellent as you say, although I'm a Western Digital Cavalier SE fan myself - came with a three year warranty on OEM versions ending with model number JB when I bought my last two drives.
However, WD changed its warranty provisions around last October and in some cases it's up to five years.
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What\'s for you won\'t pass you by
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Seagate Barracuda (ST3160023A) with 8Mb cache, currently available from Maplin for just under £70.
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btw, google or ebuyer or kelkoo or pricerunner or dealtime will bring up all inclusive delivered prices below £60.
e.g
www.pricerunner.co.uk/computing/storage/harddrives...s
www.dealtime.co.uk/xPC-Seagate_Barracuda_7200_7_Pl...A
and seagate barracuda have "Manufacturer 5 years warranty ".
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I know I could have got it a few pounds cheaper elsewhere, but the bird-in-hand principle took hold this time - also the fact that Maplin are very good about taking things back if they don't work for you, as opposed to being downright faulty.
Less than 50p/Gb is still a fair deal, IMHO!
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One thing worth mentioning is that a new HD is probably the most cost-effective upgrade going for any PC that is more than a year or two old, as not only do you get oodles of extra storage space, but everything happens a lot more briskly (notwithstanding my original problem!). I took the easy route of 'ghosting' the contents of my old drive straight across, but if I had done a clean install and removed all my clutter, things would be happening even faster.
What is easy to forget (and computer salesmen don't tell you) is that however fast your HD, it remains the biggest bottleneck in the system, so any improvement there will be more noticeable than faster chips/busses/motherboards elsewhere. I wouldn't argue against more memory, of course, but right now I'd certainly recommend a new HD as the most bang for your buck!
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Fair comment, especially as storage space these days costs buttons.
Four years ago a 6.4GB hard drive cost around £65 - today you can get 160GB including a faster spin speed and bigger cache for that price or even less.
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I have to say I think memory is the most cost effective performance upgrade. I have seen far too many systems with win xp and only 256mb memory crawling and swapping. 512ddr for under £30 makes lots of difference.
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>>with win xp and only 256mb memory crawling and swapping>>
I've got XP Pro and, guess what, 256MB of RAM.
There's certainly no crawling and swapping in my case and I've got a lot of stuff on my system, including Google Earth and Nasa's World Wind 1.3, a PCI Freeview TV card etc...:-)
It all works in harmony although, to be fair, I wouldn't say "Go away" to another 256MB of RAM that found its way onto my desk....:-))
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Fair comment, especially as storage space these days costs buttons. Four years ago a 6.4GB hard drive cost around £65 - today you can get 160GB including a faster spin speed and bigger cache for that price or even less. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - What\'s for you won\'t pass you by
4 and a half years ago I bought a 30 GB for £84 and a 20 GB for £65, I'm not sure if it was you before Stuartli but someone was quote huge prices for stuff in the past that just wern't true true. If your going to quote prices at least get them right.
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>>If your going to quote prices at least get them right.>>
On average I've bought a new hard drive every two years and, on average, they have cost me around £65 - I paid £66 to dabs.com on July 17th, 2003 for a Western Digital WD600JB (i.e. 60GB).
It replaced a 20GB drive acquired a year previously obtained by a £30 cash plus 6.4GB Fuji HDD swap with a pal; the Fuji had been obtained a year or so earlier at a price of £64 from a local computer outlet. The reason for the swap was because the buyer was a computer newbie and didn't require such a "large" hard drive at the time.
Some other purchases (usually on behalf of my son who's out at work all day and obviously can't be in to collect deliveries at his home) include a 41GB IBM Erricson 7200rpm/2MB cache HDD which cost £104 plus £18.20 VAT on June 19, 2001; a D-Link DSL-504 ADSL router with 4-port 10/100 switch for £156 on March 7th, 2002 and an OEM version of the Pioneer 106 DVD recorder for £109.78 plus VAT on August 15th, 2003.
Just for further interest, I have a September 1995 copy of the Action catalogue; some of the prices are almost unbelievable.
A Toshiba T2100 notebook series cost from £1,535 to £1,969 + VAT (hard drives from 350 to 520MB!); the Toshiba Satellite Pro 400CDT with CD-ROM and 810MB hard drive was £3,149 plus VAT.
In the desktops area, a couple of examples. An IBM Pentium90 with 8MB of RAM and 540MB hard drive was £1,479 plus VAT and a Fujitsu iCL ErgoPro Pentium90 with 16MB of RAM and 540MB hard drive £1,699 plus VAT (monitor and keyboard extra!).
External hard drives cost £349 plus VAT for 420MB and £579 plus VAT for 1200MB; 4MB SIMM memory (matched pairs for Pentium required) £135 each, 8MB £259 each and 32MB £795 each (plus VAT).
If you were really with it, a Panasonic CD rewriter was £509 and individual Maxell CD-Rs £10.45 (Sony £13.90), all plus VAT; CD-RW disks were roughly three times more price wise....
So don't complain about computer systems, components, hardware etc prices today - in real terms they have dropped dramatically whilst specifications and quality have risen dramatically.
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"in real terms they have dropped dramatically"
You're not kidding. The original subject of this discussion holds some 5000 times as much data as my first hard drive, bought about 16 years ago for about 4 times the money! Seven or eight years before that, the firm I worked for bought a 30Mb Winchester disc (as they were then called, having originally been the product of the gun maker) for their minicomputer, at a cost of £5000. It came in a separate cabinet, on castors...
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carl_a
I think that's a bit harsh - Stuartli contributes some excellent advice in the backroom, but especially around in CRQs - I've learned a good few things from him, and I've got more qualifications and experience in IT than you can wave a stick at. He gives good advice in good faith.
Now come on, play nice.
-- Lee .. A festivus for the rest of us.
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