[Moogs]

Cybermonkey: I will be giving it a second go tomorrow. I'll let you guys know how it turns out.

Alcimedes: Sorry for the long-winded posts. I'm glad you posted those points. I will try the formatting method you suggest as your conclusions seem logical to me based on what XP is doing. Thanks!

I'm pretty sure between the two or three things I've got down in my war plan, that I will emerge victorious. *knocks on wood*

[Moogs]

Just FYI (don't really have the motivation to talk about much of anything right now), Alcimedes had it right. I had installed the drive and jumpered it properly. Just had to find the hidden "Manage" thingy. From there it would only partition and format 137GB of the drive because SP1 was missing (which I ended up installing). But long story short, other than some old updates it should work out now.

Thanks, man.

[DMBand0026]

glad you got it working. Point is, it should never have been that difficult.

XP blows nuts.

And that's all I have to say about that.

[Xaqtly]

Amen. I had to image 23 PCs today... what a nightmare compared to imaging Macs. Boot from floppy, select image on the network, wait 20 minutes for it to install a 1.5 GB image, reboot, run a security app, reboot again, install various apps that couldn't be included on the image, release the IP manually. Total time elapsed per PC: about 35-40 minutes.

With the Macs, I plug in my bus-powered Firewire drive, boot from it, use NetRestore to wipe and install an image onto the Mac's HD, and shut down. Total time elapsed: 4 minutes 30 seconds, and that was a 3.5 GB image. From my perspective, Windows ain't nothing but a huge waste of time and resources.

http://www.bay-wolf.com/setupmedbay.htm


this is an old post but here is a link to identical problem in notebook with XP, and a how to picture Diagram main difference being you need to right click on my computer and go to manage to get these settings

[Moogs]

Welcome to the forums.

Yah, hindsight is 20/20 but DMB is right, the problem is these things shouldn't have so many layers to them, be so obscured. Anyway, hopefully I'm done upgrading my family's PC hardware for ever and ever, amen.

[torifile]

27 steps to setup an external hard drive for a relatively new computer? Good grief. "Partition wizard"? That you have to use twice?? When I got an internal drive that I stuck in an external enclosure, it was literally 3 steps: install the drive in the enclosure (this was the hardest part), plug it into my computer, format the drive. Things like that make me very happy to be a mac user.

[BuonRotto]

Originally Posted by Vincey37 This is by far one of the worst rants I have ever seen. Look, performing hardware upgrades on your computer isn't something you're supposed to be doing.

May I PLEASE use this quote in a future thread regarding the upgradability, or rather, non-upgradability of Macs? Please???

[Koodari]

So if I read correctly, the problems were...

1) Dell hardware sucks for upgrading. (Commonly known. There are other manufacturers to pick from.)
2) Windows had not been kept up to date. (It should.)
3) Windows does not automatically format the new drive, you have to use a partitioning program, one of which is included with Windows.

There's room for improvement, but it doesn't seem all that bad really.

[jdorian]

Dell is one of the most difficult brands to upgrade. The ram and hard drives are often very difficult to get to, and since each computer is built custom, the components used and physical configurations change very often. The cases were not designed to permit easy upgrades, but instead quick, cheap and easy assembly. Windows XP can be difficult to work with, but most problems upgrading are hardware issues, not software issues.

For those people whom build their own PCs or buy off the shelf PCs, many of them pride themselves with their great cable management. They will spend hours getting wraps, ties, etc. to organize their case. I know several people whom have no artistic ability and therefore cannot properly do cable management, but they simply get somebody else to do it for them. I have several PCs which have great cable management, but they were mass produced systems. Since Apple Computers does this out of the box on their computers, they are doing a great service for their customers. However, it should be assumed that any Apple owner has paid a premium, even if only a few dollars to have a more organized computer case.

[bostongeek]

Originally Posted by Koodari So if I read correctly, the problems were... 1) Dell hardware sucks for upgrading. (Commonly known. There are other manufacturers to pick from.) 2) Windows had not been kept up to date. (It should.) 3) Windows does not automatically format the new drive, you have to use a partitioning program, one of which is included with Windows. There's room for improvement, but it doesn't seem all that bad really.

I agree, to me, this seem less of a Windows XP issue than a Dell issue. Personally, I like that XP doesn't make many assumptions as to how I want to use the PC. Windows XP is far from perfect, but I have had no more issues with WinXP as an OS than I have had with OSX as an OS (in fact, I have never had a catastrophic failure with WinXP, but unfortunately suffered on in OSX... which required a complete OS reinstall). Then again, I have been using Windows alot longer, and feel more comfortable troubleshooting any issues.

Which computer do I use more? My PowerBook, of course. But, Windows XP does what I need and want it to do just fine. So, does the Solaris PC I use, and the Gentoo-Linux PC I use.