It turns out that my computer wasn’t on it’s death bed, my hard drive was.
For the past few months I would have these symptoms:
- The power supply was extremely loud after being on for more than an hour.
- No response on occasion, which would lead to a reboot.
- Slower than normal function.
It all came to a head when all of these symptoms came together and after a reboot I got the dreaded message, “Disk Read Error.”
I knew the hard drive wasn’t dead, but there was a problem. I switched the power cables and it worked. So I backed up everything onto one of my other hard drives and purchased a new drive.
I bought a Western Digital 160 Gig PATA drive, that I must say is super quiet. You have to put your head up to the case just to hear it! It turns out that one of the pins on the 4 pin power connector had “sheered” away. I gave it to my co-worker Tito, I’m sure he can get it going again.
I knew my computer would run Windows XP, but I thought I would see if it could handle Vista. I think it runs Vista better than it ever ran XP.
I’ve had a few glitches, but nothing that wasn’t the case about XP years ago.
The biggest scare was last night. I’ve been re-installing all of my software, using my DVD-RW drive. When I went to install MS Visual Studio Pro 2008, my drive was nowhere to be found! Vista gave me a message that “there was something wrong with the driver.” After some searching I found that Vista has a quirk with some older drives. A quick registry patch resolved this.
While my computer cannot import video or audio directly anymore, it is working great as an all around PC. This is awesome news. I’m not feeling the pressure I was to purchase a new machine anymore. I can hopefully wait until our renovation is complete and I have a new office area before acquiring more equipment.