AdventureDad

I decided to upgrade the computer section of our household these past couple of days.  Just some minor stuff but just the thought of getting more computer stuff makes my mouth water.  Got a new hard drive, more RAM for the laptop, more DVDs, a card reader, and a case to hold the new drive.

I got a Dell 4550 at home which works extremely well and has already seen some upgrades.  The processor is only a P4 2.4 Ghz but it runs fast enough most of the time.  I got 1 GB of RAM and would like to get more but the motherboard can’t handle it:-(  Since we use Photoshop quite a bit we need some decent power and lots of memory.  I’m also an extreme power user.  I have at least 5 pages open in Firefox, use Photoshop, burn  DVDs, write emails, download some stuff, and make  phonecalls.  At the same time. The latest upgrade was decided when I kind of ran out of space on the desktop.  This really pissed me off.  I already got three (that’s 3) internal hard drives installed but they are full.  And I need more space. A lot more space.  I currently got the original 120 GB drive, an two additional drives, 160 GB and 200 GB.  I use Seagate drives exclusively.  It’s not that I know that much about other drives but  with this desktop I have always used Seagate and had no problems.  So I got 480 GB, and it’s full.

The latest addition is another Seagate drive, the fairly new 300 GB Barracuda 7200.8.  I really like Seagate and want to stick with them.  They are very quiet, reliable, and affordable.  Since I don’t have any more room for internal drives I had to get a case and use USB 2.0.  Found a good stylish case by Canyon and quickly put it together.  It’s really easy nowadays with Windows XP.  Just plug in the USB cable, initialize the drive and format it the way you like.  I  usually make a couple of partitions on the drive  but this will be one large partition.  And it will be encrypted with the unbreakable PGP 9.0 Desktop.  When I say unbrekable I’m aware that the NSA might have a backdoor and will be able to break the encryption but they are the only one in the world with this capacity.   Few know of this incredibly powerful agency.  It makes CIA and FBI look like pathetic boy scouts.  It’s as large as CIA and FBI together and has capabilities that will not be available publicly for many many years. 

I could of course have bought a dedicated external drive, like the 250 Gb Seagate. But it’s more expensive and I’ve read about lots of problems with their external drives.  Sounds weird since the drives should be the same as the internal ones.  Just with a case wrapped around them.

I also got a card reader from Canyon.  Can take 12 different kinds of card which should cover our needs.  We take lots of photos with the Canon EOS 20D (CF cards) and the Canon SD500 (SD cards) so this will make things a lot easier.

More memory for the almost new Dell 700 was needed.  I only got 512 Mb as the original setup and this is not enough for a power user like me.  It gets slow, especially when I use Photoshop together with other applications.  Or at least slow for me.  I tend to be somewhat impatient and want things done quickly.  And a slow computer is very annoying.  So I got 1GB of Kingston RAM which should speed things up a bit.  I can have a maximum of 2 GB RAM but the new addition will only bring it up to 1.25 GB.  The laptop apparently got two modules for the memory.  One easy to reach underneath and another one which is tough to reach.  The keyboard has to be removed and that sounds like too much work just to get 2 GB or RAM which I probably won’t need anyway.  The leftover 256 MB RAM will go on Ebay next week for a few bucks.

The new drive is now up and running which means plenty of free space.  I can barely notice the performance drop in the external USB 2.0 drive compared to the internal ones.  The card reader and the laptop memory have not been taken for a test drive yet but I expect a must faster laptop and a decet card reader.  Now it’s time to fill the expansion with delicious geek stuff………

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