Ah! Harddrive Space!

Holy crap to quote Steve, what type of computer have you got - I was trying to talk Steve into a Tablet do you use one

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Carl wrote: Holy crap to quote Steve

"Excusy" to quote Carl LMAO......

Craig, do you have it sparated from your main computer.....which is why you wanted to know about the cross-over cables???

Sounds like you have some serious capacity for images.....maybe a server for a website LOL..... J/K

steve, no, it's an internal drive and is now H, I, J, K, and L in partition lettering. four 100 gig partitions with the last one being smaller, about 65 gigs. yeah, that doesnt add up to 500 gigs, but windows/bios always takes some of the drive space for internal use.

i hear that a lot, carl, that someone using a pad/pen will never go back to a mouse. for me, a mouse seems very natural, but i'm not a pencil, pen, brush artist. i'm a pixel pusher. so, i dont 'draw' very well. so a tablet seems a bit odd to me. and whereas i am curious as to advantages, i've never been quite curious enough to invest in one. Best Buy had one in their store the last time i was in there and i was tempted to give it a shot, but in the end, didnt. i may yet but i just cant see doing a photo restoration with 1000 different clone clicks with a pen. it's not that i dont think it would work; it's just i dont know how it would work any better than a mouse.

and yes, self-taught on the computer stuff. i've been playing with computers since about 1972 or 3. mainframes mostly back then, but my first code i ever wrote was on a Radio Shack TRS 80 in BASIC so, i normally always build my own rigs. building is easy. it's windows that is hard the only computer language i've ever really liked was Assembly. it's the only one that ever made any sense to me. good old Op Codes! but, i've fallen behind on the hardware side of things. some idiot program called 'filter forge' has distracted me for over a year now

and steve, actually, i am tempted to put my Abyss web server back up again...somewhat, if only for a reliable way for others to get large files from me. i'll think about it

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I'm here if you need me

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Yeah sure - easy if you know what your doing LOL

seriously, it's pretty modular. mostly plug and play type operation. you do have to know not to try to plug a 900 pin cpu into a 700 pin slot and have some idea of heat output and handling that, but it's really pretty simple. and you do want to know some of the ratings and capabilities of motherboards and cpu's, but you really dont have to have an electronics degree to do it.

and back when computers were normally running over $2000 per rig, there was a fair markup/profit for building your own and selling them. now, stuff is so cheap that the markup has dropped WAY off and you're almost better buying 'off the rack'. the only problem with that is windows. i hate OEM windows! i hate it with a passion. oh, oem is 'original equipment manufacturer' and it now pretty much means in the software business, windows is already installed on your computer and all you get is a 'restore cd', which is a FAR cry from an install cd. i hate those things. it does make computers cheap, but it also makes them almost unrepairable except for a complete reformat and reinstall. and that just basically sucks most of the time.

building your own rig also means you can configure your box for expansion. a lot of off the rack computers dont allow very much of this. i hate onboard graphics. piece of junk in most cases. i want a video card, a BIG video card. i want expansion bays for drives and LOTS of power plugs for extra devices. i want a BIG power supply and a ton of usb ports. i want audio on the front panel and usb's on the front panel. i want a full sized motherboard and a full sized case. and i want a ton of spaces for fans. nothing kills a computer like heat. dust is the secondary reason. i want expansion card slots! lots of em. and i want ports i dont even know what they do, coming out my ears

in my last rig i had 4 physical harddrives plugged in, an expansion card for more, two cd/dvd drives with slots for two more, a 3 1/2 inch floppy drive and if i still had one around, i'd have stuck a 5 1/4 floppy drive in there too. i had onboard graphics and a video card. i had a dsl modem and a normal modem. i had 2 printers, a scanner and a dedicated negative/slide scanner all installed, plus one external drive for backups. i even had my answering machine hooked up to the computer and my computer answered my phone calls and logged them for me. i had a tape player hooked up so i could copy my cassettes over to cd, 4 speakers and the kitchen sink

ok, so maybe there is a bit more to it than just plug and play

partitioning is fairly easy these days. you can even do it from windows xp (with exceptions) or you could use a program like partition magic, which is quite good. with my new drive, Seagate provided a program called 'discwizard' that came with the drive that worked very fast and quite nicely. there are rules to partitioning, but most of the new programs will explain those rules or keep you from breaking them.

the way windows grew up and the way hardware grew up on a pc was one of the most convoluted, shoestring affairs you'd ever hate to witness. on the other hand, it was a rather brilliant move on microsoft's part (for the most part). hard lessons had been learned by apple and commodore about abandoning a given line of pc's. when apple and commodore moved from 8 bit to 16 bit machines, they pretty much abandoned the 8 bit machines, and thus abandoned their client base and took severe dips in market share. they both ended up with much superior machines but nobody to use them. commodore went broke and apple is only now coming out of the slump. microsoft took the other road. they took the original 8088 processor/pc and re-tooled it again and again, upgrading, patching, string and bubblegum, work-arounds, and a host of very strange moves, but always made things backwards compatible. this kept their client base relatively happy. your software from one version of windows would usually work in the next version... usually, with some notable exceptions.

so, pc's grew up through a mish-mashh of changes. and so did the software that ran on it. partitioning used to be done in DOS (disk operating system). you used a program called 'fdisk', which could format and partition a drive. it was a very small program. when microsoft did away with the formal DOS, things changed a bit. there was no DOS in which to run fdisk. ok, there's a console thing, but it's just not the same thing. so, formatting and partitioning became something you did before you installed windows or as you installed windows and then, when windows was running, you could do the rest of it. or, that's how i'd do mine.

once windows is in place, you can right click on the 'my computer' icon and scroll down the little menu and pick 'manage'. that will bring up some more options. one of these is 'disk management' (i think that's what it's called). in there, you get a visual display of your drives, including cd, dvd, thumb and any other types that classify as a drive. from there, you can pick the drive you want to either format or partition or both and go from there. it's relatively simple and most of the basic rules to partitioning are explained there.

i've run linux partitions before. MUCH more stable than windows. but, when i ran it it was still pretty primitive and not a lot of supported software. this was also back in the day when you had to tell linux what you had in the way of hardware and configure and install drivers manually. not a lot of fun... well, to most of us. now, you can pretty much pick up a ubuntu or redhat and they'll find your hardware, install your drivers and poof, linux! there's also a lot more software for linux these days, especially in the server area. linux makes a great server. a lot of the forums you see around are being run under linux.

and where i still have a passing interest in linux, i probably wont be running it for a while. i just dont have the need currently and the novelty of it wore off a long time ago for me. though, i do admit, ubuntu sort of interests me.

what interests me more these days is vmware, virtual machine software. this is pretty slick stuff. you can basically run another operating system as a sort of shell under windows. it's a virtual machine. and it's absolutely the safest way to surf the net. you could even surf the net without a firewall, anti-virus and any other form of protection and be virtually assured you'd never have your base operating system corrupted. a vm machine simply disappears when you close it. thus, any viruses or other malware you might pick up, simply go poof when you close the vm module.

the modules come in many flavors. i ran an i.e. module. i'd start up the module and simply surf the net using a real version of i.e. but it was all contained within the module. nothing from the module could ever touch windows xp. it runs in its own little universe. shut the universe down and all malware goes with it.

i dont know how many modules are out now. there was the i.e. one, a windows one, and talk about a mac one coming and i think a firefox one. they all ran under windows xp. the software created a virtual partition and you could actually install any operating system to this virtual partition. you then could just save that install and shut it down and call it up when desired. so, it was a machine within a machine but they essentially didnt talk to each other. windows xp provided the shell or framework but the vm module was its own machine. pretty slick

i havent really followed up on that though. so, i'm out of date on what's going on with vmware. i dont know if they ever got a mac module done or not. i've still got the program somewhere, but havent played with it for over a year now. a LOT can happen in a year with soft/hardware .

Good drives, Kraellin. I've got two of their 750s on my desktop. As insane as it sounds but I have 2.4TB on my desktop (2 Seagate 750s, 1 Iomega 500, and 1 WD 400!) Real estate is so cheap nowadays there's no reason not to have a good backup system in place (or RAID, take your pick!)

I've moved this thread from General Discussion to our new forum called Offtopic.