I like my big RAM

Just connecting on my new PC

While I didnt mind my P166 W95 48M baby [I'm patient], I think it might die anyday, so I wanted to get in 1st. New PC was about £600 from Nethighstreet, including an HP printer/scanner jobby and a nice Samsung 753 CRT. Amazing what 9 years has done in IT technology. I nearly got a SFF, like you guys reccomended, but this is quiet enough, and not ugly like the old PC. I had to laff to see plug-n-pray actually work at last [an old external modem], and set-up wizards that actually do the job faster than you could manually. I'm an XP virgin, but I see it's just NT4 with a new coat, so I can live with that and it seems genuinely helpful. Now I've just got to figure out how to extract data from a W95 PC with a bust CD copier, no network port, and FAT32 disks..anyone remember laplink?

 

The way I would do is to connect your old drive to your new computer. Then just copy over your FAT32 files over to your new NTFS drive.

 

First, TURN OFF the PC before you do this.

To give you slightly more of a clue, there are two connections to the hard disk. One is for power and has black, red and yellow wires going into it. You'll find a spare hanging loose (or more likely tied up out of the way) inside your new machine. The other is the ribbon cable which carries all the data and control signals to and from the computer. If you look at the ribbon cable feeding the hard disk on your new machine, you will find that it has a spare plug on it. This is for connection of a second hard disk. (Don't use the one that leads to the optical drive).

Once you have plugged your old hard disk into the ribbon cable and into the power supply, power up your new PC. Your old hard disk will now appear as a hard drive in 'My Computer' and you can explore its contents in the usual way and drag files off of it into a folder on your new hard disk.

 

Cheers Chris, I'm OK with IDE stuff [or whatever it's called now]. In my day the thought of combining NTFS and Fat32 was beyond technology. I see that XP does it all and more, so you and ATrade are correct - that is the best method to move data.

I just had success trying to reclaim a modem with some funny settings on it - previously used for an IBM AS400. I don't understand AT commands really, but I managed to restore the factory settings with hyperterminal and persuade it to remember them at start-up, so now XP can talk to it OK

[later edit] I notice that XP doesn't recognise the modem is on COM1 unless it's powered up before XP starts..it's good to see the OS still has faults, so Bill can flog us another Windows later

 

That's not a fault. With the old style serial ports there is no way for XP to know if a device is attached unless than device responds. To be able to detect you switching the modem on, XP would have to regularly poll the serial ports and that is rather a slow process, hence why it doesn't do it. There is a solution to this problem. It's called USB

 

It still astounds me that you guys find it acceptable that modern computers still come attached with legacy 20 year old hardware. Why do you find this acceptable?

Floppy drives FFS, I couldn't fit a single image from my camera on one of those things, what is the point? Serial connections! Get with the 21st century.

I can ear it now "but but, I have a 15 year old hand held scanner that still works, I need a serial connector"

 

Floppy drive I'd gladly get rid off, however I have 2 S-ATA RAID controllers that require the drivers to be loaded off a floppy to install the operating system - bloody annoying, but a necessity for my hardware setup with current operating systems .

All the legacy crap you speak of can be disabled in the BIOS, so you don't have to put up with it taking up hardware resources (particularly IRQs) if you don't need the limited functionality it offers. Which means as far as my PC is concerned, I have no serial ports or parallel ports. PS2 ports remain but to be honest they do the job fine - what do USB keyboards or mice offer other than hot plug/unplugging (which if of extremely limited value anyway as I see it)?

 

Will,

Don't worry, its just Gary over compensating again

 

Are you kidding garyi? I've still got the disks for 'Office' somewhere [about 18,453,293 of them..]

Anyway, whats with this 'XP service kak 2' ?? A 93.3MB download...took about 5 hours! So XP now tells me the firewall is on - big deal, it was on anyway. Am I missing something?