When it comes time to buy that accessory for your computer, this would probably be a good time shoot me an email as in most cases I will be able to, if nothing else, point you in the right direction and in most cases, will be pointing you to the best product that money can buy. As well, in most cases, the best price. This may be something that I can get through my suppliers even, and save you more, not to mention the installation that goes with it. In many cases your "neighbors kid" may be the person that knows how to do the installation and not that I frown on this, other then that fact that I was not even aware of the potential disaster. Yes, I am referring to when things start to go wrong with that supposed 'simple accessory' you purchased that was supposed to just plug right in! Or in a most recent issue, a new (second) hard drive that was installed by 'a friend'. Problems seemed unapparent--for the first week or so, but then things started to go wrong, as in, the computer wouldn't boot! Now I get the call and find many issues, the simplest being the fact that they had spent too much for too little! Bottom line folks, is when you are in the market for "anything technically related" you should be turning to someone that is technically apt! Hello!
Yes, that would be me... someone (hopefully you call a friend), that can walk you through the steps easily and without the headaches of dealing with all the problems after things don't work the way they should have when you bought it!
The example I am referring to is with regards to that 'second hard drive' .. First of all, if your main drive is running out of room and with high speed Internet and any teenager in the house, there will be a good chance you are a likely candidate for the new 'larger' hard drive! Thing is, you could just purchase a second hard drive and install it yourself as a slave drive to the first one, but odds are, the first one is quite old and is probably a lot slower then the new one you just bought and since your operating system is on the old one, wouldn't it make sense to have it running "as fast as possible"? Yes, what I typically find is when it is time for a new hard drive because yours is getting full, it is best to just remove the old one for the newer, faster and much larger drive. At this point, if you really want to, you can partition the drive in to smaller sections therefore making it appear as though you have more then one hard drive. This can be useful, but I don't really recommend it, other then creating a 'backup partition' where I would be keeping the 'ghost image' of the main system drive. This becomes very useful for ongoing backups. Since windows (xp and vista) can handle very large drive partitions, it is best to actually keep your drive as large as possible. The old theory of placing important data on one drive and your 'movies and music', for example, on a second partition is probably not the best theory anymore. Not to mention the headache in having to remember drive letters and what happens when you do install that second hard drive, creating a nightmare in some cases, if a program like "drive mapper" is not run. This is pretty much the problems I was faced with when I began my diagnosis of this clients computer. In the end, I yanked the old drive, backed up the newer one and cloned the system drive to the newer drive and then restored the data that had already been installed to the new drive.
To note, this entire job would not have been necessary if I had done the job in the first place, as well, the size of the hard drive that was installed could have been twice what was actually installed... but then sometimes I guess, you do get what you pay for! I just wish my ability to get my message across was more successful BEFORE you go out and buy these things.
All I can do at this point is ask you to please remember to ask me first... if for no other reason, I should be able to point you in the right direction and most likely will save you some money or get you a better product then what you would have ended up with! If you haven't been reading this blog regularly, please add it to your favorites (or better yet, subscribe to it--if you understand RSS). Yes, RSS is something that I have been trying to 'teach' my existing clients since 2004 but when dealing with ages 10-95 it sometimes seems the impossible task. As well, my TIPS page and SOFTWARE/SUPPORT page should be of some assistance if you haven't visited them lately for updates.
