DescentBB

Just in case some of you were wondering where the hell I've been lately...

My 7-year-old 1.4GHz P4 finally burnt out its IDE controllers after shutdown Sunday, November 11th, and the next night greets me with a \"disk read error\". It won't boot from an XP CD, but the data on the HD survived...until I followed some Web advice and ran FIXBOOT. Then I take it to my friend's to reimage it and suddenly my 160GB NTFS drive is a 10MB FAT16, and the filenames are complete gibberish! I took it into the shop and they were able to recover about 50 gigs worth, including some irreplaceable stuff, but some was lost, namely the root dir and any folder after and mostly including the letter 'P' (including Program Files!). They were also able to update the BIOS, but the guy wasn't confident I'd get more than a few months before something else might happen. I was told that since so many of my components aren't made anymore (i.e. my AGP video card), replacing the motherboard, etc. with something comparable would be about $930. Or, I could get a new, low-end system with a 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo and DVD burner for about $675.

So I went with the smarter choice and put on a fresh XP installation, and I'm slowly rebuilding my old capablities. Descent works, loading levels MUCH faster, except for some graphical anomalies I'll detail in a Tech Support thread later. Since there's no game port with the integrated sound, I decided against getting an adapter for my 10-year-old Gravis Firebird 2, and put the Saitek X52 joystick/throttle on my Christmas list. In line with my love of bargains and my reuse/recycle ethics, I snagged a reconditioned model from the company and slashed $60 off the retail price!

Moral of the story, back up regularly and know when to let go. I'll see y'all in the mines soon enough!

Holding on to a computer while keeping \"irreplaceable\" data on it without backups for any duration is the same as sitting on a land mine. Let alone holding on to it for 7 years. While it isn't uncommon for a computer to last 10 years or more of light use, an every day use computer will probably start to develop problems and failures by the third or fourth year, and continue to degrade after that.

The video artifacts you are talking about are probably due to you using some sort of integrated GPU on the motherboard, buy almost any real low end video card for it in the $100-150 range and it will be fixed. But if you could post the full quoted system specs in the most detail they gave you I could probably suggest the which would be the best video cards to buy for it.

Owch. External drive, man. 1TB for ~$400.

I know, I have no one to blame but myself for waiting so long and procrastinating. Fortunately the HD that failed was still under warranty and they got me a free replacement. I now have it in a device that makes it an external USB drive. It will soon be set up to be my main backup solution, and I have another 250GB drive if I need more space.

Of course, I can't really talk. I still have yet to use my 80gb WD Drive...