The system I'm using right now, at one of the offices, I built about 8 years ago. It's OLD. Asus mobo. SCSI drives. Dual-processor 233 Mhz Pentium III. Win NT 4. But it has been a workhorse and stable as a rock.
My PC (the one I use at home, out of 15 others spread among two offices) crashed-and-burned last Sunday afternoon. The power supply fan had been 'sticky' for months. If turned off long enough to cool down, it'd not want to get running unless I gave it a poke. Wasn't a problem being as I never turn the thing off except during an extended power outage. I *knew* about the situation, kept putting off changing the power supply or rigging up an alternate fan. Apparently it got completely stuck, the power supply overheated, and took the motherboard and CD burner with it. D-e-a-d. Although I know better, I had not been doing daily backups (I have a tape drive). The tape drive had gone out months ago, and I'd disabled the backup scheduler. I replaced the drive, did an ad-hoc full backup of the C drive (but not the J partition) in February, but didn't turn the daily scheduler back on. By Sheer Luck the hard drive is OK so I slaved to the new system. The tape drive and SCSI card are OK, DVD burner, and modem.
Back up your computer now and keep it backed up regularly -- daily if you use it for finances -- using some choice of media that holds the data separately and off the system -- tape, CD, DVD, external hard drive, whatever works for you. It does no good to keep backup copies of files on the local hard drive if the drive gets zapped.
The new system is an AMD something or other. 4.3 Ghz? I don't even know. I don't have time to build a system these days, so I told the computer store in the room across from my desk, gimme one of what you got. They build 'em in-house. Gigabyte mobo. 1 GB RAM. 160 GB hard. DVD burner. Monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers, I already had. I added the original hard drive, tape & SCSI card, DVD burner, & modem this evening. Windows 2000 Pro. I do not care for XP.
My PC (the one I use at home, out of 15 others spread among two offices) crashed-and-burned last Sunday afternoon. The power supply fan had been 'sticky' for months. If turned off long enough to cool down, it'd not want to get running unless I gave it a poke. Wasn't a problem being as I never turn the thing off except during an extended power outage. I *knew* about the situation, kept putting off changing the power supply or rigging up an alternate fan. Apparently it got completely stuck, the power supply overheated, and took the motherboard and CD burner with it. D-e-a-d. Although I know better, I had not been doing daily backups (I have a tape drive). The tape drive had gone out months ago, and I'd disabled the backup scheduler. I replaced the drive, did an ad-hoc full backup of the C drive (but not the J partition) in February, but didn't turn the daily scheduler back on. By Sheer Luck the hard drive is OK so I slaved to the new system. The tape drive and SCSI card are OK, DVD burner, and modem.
Back up your computer now and keep it backed up regularly -- daily if you use it for finances -- using some choice of media that holds the data separately and off the system -- tape, CD, DVD, external hard drive, whatever works for you. It does no good to keep backup copies of files on the local hard drive if the drive gets zapped.
The new system is an AMD something or other. 4.3 Ghz? I don't even know. I don't have time to build a system these days, so I told the computer store in the room across from my desk, gimme one of what you got. They build 'em in-house. Gigabyte mobo. 1 GB RAM. 160 GB hard. DVD burner. Monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers, I already had. I added the original hard drive, tape & SCSI card, DVD burner, & modem this evening. Windows 2000 Pro. I do not care for XP.
