Close... Too Close

[filkertom]

I've been having more and more problems with my main external hard drive lately. Today, it took about ten minutes for my computer to recognize it. So I hied off to Best Buy, which has a Seagate 500 GB external drive on sale for $119.99, and I'm copying like crazy. There have been a few hosed and corrupted files, but nothing at all vital. I've got almost everything on DVD anyway, but I'll probably make extra copies just in case.

I also have to do a full hard drive wipe and reinstall on a Gateway laptop I got for a song (almost literally). It's all Vista 'n' stuff, and I'm going to make it an XP machine.

Any tech woes or triumphs on your end?

ETA: Oh crap. I think a lot of stuff might be hosed, on multiple machines. Not related, just all at the same time. It's gonna be a long night.

Comments

Re: Linux

[moquif.livejournal.com]

Thank you. SL is one of the few games (and only big game) that I know of that works on Linux. My original plan was to drag out my 4+ year old computer and rebuild it using Red Hat. But when I tried to cannibalize the hard drives, both had gone south. Now I think it the effort and frustration of rebuilding the old computer will be more than the cost of buying a new one. There's a friend of a friend who knows a lot about building computers and Linux. Maybe I can pay him to make me one. (The ones in the store make you pay for an OS you're going to delete. So why bother going that route?)

Not to thread-jack, but does anyone have a Linux box? How well does it work and what do you use it for?

Re: Linux

[mdlbear]

Been running Linux at home and at work since 1994. Does everything I need it to do, including web development, software development, typesetting, audio; you name it. The audio on my CD (see userpic; available on CD Baby) was entirely recorded, edited, and mastered on Linux.

There are a couple of fields where software on Linux is lacking; games and graphics, sadly, among them. And as for security and stability:

[steve 508] ssh -lroot gc
Last login: Tue Sep 18 07:40:58 2007 from 198.180.216.25
gc:~# uptime
 21:20:53 up 512 days,  2:00,  2 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

Re: Linux

[killernurd.livejournal.com]

Good uptime!

Re: Linux

[killernurd.livejournal.com]

It works very well. Gaming needs a little help, as do graphics, but if you're willing to work with nVidia cards, you get spectacular graphics performance. SLI is catching up to the Windows side quickly.

Also, Linux will run on just about anything. x86, ia_64, AMD64, PPC, ARM, DEC, SPARC/UltraSPARC, you name it.

I use it for everything - graphics (GIMP or Photoshop-on-Crossover), gaming (not all games work, but most work well enough), audio (I run SHOUTcast broadcasts from my machine, as well as recording and mastering), web/software devel, and just about anything else I can come up with.