[extropy-chat] when will computers improve?

[Robert J. Bradbury]

> If I buy the upgrade, I would
> have to load Win 98, then the Win2k upgrade. Given the age of my Win98
> disk(4 years old) and it's condition from being put in and out so many times
> when installing drivers and crap, I am probably better off buying the full
> version.

Symantec has bought PowerQwest -- get any of "Drive Image", "Partition Magic"
or "Drive Copy" as suit your needs -- they aren't that expensive and will
more than save you the hours of time involved in a system reinstall.  Then
go to one of the hardware vendors (like Insight) and buy yourself a large
cheap drive (Insight has 20gb IDE drives for ~$60).  Buy two if you are
paranoid.  Then install it, use Drive Copy (or one of the other tools)
to partition it and copy partitions or the entire drive to the spare
drive.  Then you can either leave it installed or remove it.  If you
are running Win2K, you can set the drive up so that it powers down
after N minutes of non-use (saves wear and tear and keeps the case
cooler).

You are rarely going to use it so you don't really care about the
performance.  I adopted a policy like this years ago and it makes
me feel much more comfortable about my system reliability.  I've
got duplexed drives on my NT 4.0 server (also in Win2K) -- unfortunately
not in my personal Win2K.  But you can fix that using automated
backups using one of the UNIX toolkits or manually run Drive Copy
or Drive Image.

The nice thing about these big drives is that I now have a huge
partition that does nothing but store the gigabytes of software
that I've downloaded off the net from time to time.

Robert