Replies

Looks like he is going to be getting a USB drive for Christmas!

Thanks. I’m almost done. But before I actually run the MSE installer, should I disable the Comodo Firewall? I would prefer not to experiment in this particular situation…!

Just an FYI caveat emptor: The Amazon page (for what appears to be the replacement for the original product at the link in the article) is chock full of 1-star ratings from people who literally fried their drives when they plugged in the power. It’s hard to tell whether this was from bad adapter assembly or a power plug that could be pushed in backwards (despite the traditional shape designed to prevent this). Ouch!

“You may find that the SATA drive will be more reliable than the IDE drive.”

Ironically, I had a SATA drive in a different PC and it ran out of extra sectors to replace bad ones after a couple of years. So I replaced it with a bigger one, and it failed, too. So it may just be a crap shoot until you get one that lasts longer than a few weeks. In the meantime, the disk in the Windows 98 system that these all replaced has been humming along since 1999.

The previous owner confirmed that the system was actually working, except of course being left out in a light drizzle on my patio. One might think that would be a critical problem, but it sat in a corner for at least a month and a half before I pulled the disk out (having never turned it on) and its original memory works fine. However, my XP system won’t recognize it. I reset all the BIOS “disk setup” changes except the one for “master IDE drive” and then reset all of them to the “off” default without any success. I wonder if there is a cheap (i.e., free) test someone can do if I take it to a store.

Thanks…that gets me closer. One difference and one big problem:

The difference is that I was reminded that my main drive is a SATA (small blue cable going straight to a 4-pin on the motherboard, while the teenager drive is an IDE (I believe—it uses the standard wide ribbon cable). I grabbed the drive’s old cable from the junk computer and plugged it into the port next to the similar one being used for the CD drive, so that only the old disk is on the ribbon cable.

The problem is that I can’t get the PC to recognize the drive at all. I went into Setup and set all the other drive options from “Off” to “Auto” but the bootup produces a “not found” message for all three possible drives on the setup screen. I had pulled the jumper from the drive, which should have set it to “slave” but in reading your reply, I probably should have used the “master” setting or “cable select” since it’s the only one on the cable. After I send this I’m going to shut down and put the jumper back on, but any comments would be appreciated in the meantime.

***

Back again, and setting the jumper to “Master” did not change the result — the system isn’t seeing the drive. I’m double-checking with the former owners to see if it was actually working at all, but the implication from previous conversations is that it was.

Hiliarious: I opened the case, jiggled the ribbon cables and the DVD writer started working again. *sigh*

Thanks. Fortunately, the user name was the same. Oddly, it began working after a few attempts. Now I just need to remember to check the “Remember password” box…

Wellll…okay: I disabled simple file sharing. Now the Vista system asks me for a login when I try to access anything shared on the XP system. The default login it is presenting seems to be that of my Vista system account but if I use either that password or the XP system’s password (the login names are the same), it rejects it. I cannot see anything on the XP system that would let me set up a user account from another system, so apparently “simple file sharing” means “file sharing that isn’t too complex to understand” Any suggestions as to how this actually works? Thanks!

Do you have easy file sharing selected on XP?

Thanks…I assume you meant “simple file sharing” but yes, that is turned on under the Control Panel’s “Folder Options” applet.

With the current sharing strategy from the XP machine, were you ever able to access the drive from the network? Does it work normally when accessed locally?

Yes, it works fine for reading CD’s. It has bee shared for a while, but I can’t say that I’ve ever accessed it over the network. I also just tried accessing it from an old Win 98 machine and could not open the drive (on the other hand, I can get to the Win98 CD from the XP system, which may be irrelevant).

“Can you access other shared folders on the XP machine? ”

( I thought I posted this, but maybe I didn’t press the “Post button…)

I can definitely access the XP system’s “Shared Documents” folder and regularly move files back and forth between the two systems.

No, the CD drive dropped off the “Computer” window’s list of available drives on the Vista system. I may have to pull out the charge card…

As long as you are like 95% of people on the planet and don’t use more than 5% of Office’s capabilities (even Office 97), then you’ll be happy with OO. If you work with others, just set the default save formats to common denominators like “doc” and “xls” (which even Office doesn’t do). This will probably still be true even if you use 25% of the capabilities. A couple of observations, though: OO has a few maddening differences in the basic interface (try using [Delete] a few times in the spreadsheet for an example) and there is no substitute for the tight relationship between Outlook and the other components (that I’ve found so far).

Great post, but I have to say that the head-shaking started as soon as you began to explain the ridiculous syntax one has to use, and the cussing started when you mentioned that Search uses wildcards in a nonstandard (for DOS–>Windows) way. Petermat mentioned that you may have missed the main point and suggested that it was that Microsoft doesn’t advertise changes accessibly, but for me, the main point is that Windows Search does not work. By that, I don’t mean that it doesn’t function or doesn’t work in the way your much-needed documentation explains, but that it attempts to give the average user an interface that often returns unusable results. Over the years, and especially when helping someone on their own computer, I’ve had to use the various incarnations of Windows Search, and the times that it returned the file I was looking for is in the neighborhood of 20%. Now, I understand that this was probably due to my not using it correctly (or is it that Windows uses wildcards incorrectly?), yet that points back to the main issue: A search tool should default to returning files with or without a standard wildcard and with or without some key text that might appear in them. Period. Any advanced uses beyond that should be accessible with simple, clear visual controls and labels. And the idea that a general Windows search tool would automatically return the contents of emails is simply stupid. That’s what email software is for.

Finally, the main reason one actually resorts to searching for a file (as opposed to checking where you know it’s supposed to be) is that you’ve lost it somewhere on the drive (a victim of drag-and-drop or a download whose destination wasn’t what you assumed). When that happens, I use the search tool in my favorite two-pane file manager to do a brute force search of the entire drive. If that fails, I know that the file isn’t there and don’t have to worry that an over-engineered tool has second-guessed what I was trying to do.

As it turns out, CLiNT was on the right track: There was no disk, but I forgot (and then ignored while concentrating on less destructive options) that the “Recovery Options” included a “Toshiba System Restore” at the bottom. I had looked at that early in the process and had backed away quickly when it became obvious that it was the el cheapo “support” option that wiped out your existing stuff. However, after looking at all the options, and getting critical data off the drive, I decided to exercise that option. So she’s back up. Thanks for all input on this.