A and B are restricted to floppy drives....C is restricted to boot HD....all the others [in XP] can be whatever you wish...

Just do like they did about a week ago on the screensavers, get a Serial ATA card and buy alot of 400gig hardrives and build a 2Terabite system lol

I would love to have a Terrabyte of something anything, Ram, Hard Drives, Macaroni. Terrabytes is like the Final Frontier for me, the only drawback being $$$ of course. Heck I have stalled Hardware wise. I would love Serial ATA, but I think I am waiting of SuperSized FlashRam, to replace everything, or something equivelent. You want a cool sound card, with accesories, get one made by Hercules. I have a Hercules Game Theatre XP, and love it... It has a breakout box that sits on the Desktop, with extra Ports, external Midi Ports (the real ones that are Round and hook to my Keyboards.) Surround Sound Jacks and all kinds of other Goodies. Bought it on eBay for $40. It does hardware decoding of MP3's on the Soundcard, and has plenty of little knobs to twiddle with. But do not ever by a Hercules Video Card, they use a proprietary Rendering Engine that is worthless. My latest True Desire is a 64bit System. Wouldn't you know it... They come out in laptop form after I (just) baught my new HP Lappy. My old Dell lasted forever and is actually sitting on my Desk with a sprung (totally Farked) Hinge, and is no longer a portable. It has lasted so long, my wife will be hard pressed to let me have a new one anytime soon, after buying this new machine.
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is it true that the new 24bit sound cards, well that the human ear cant hear more then 16bit?

People, I now see that I am in the presence of greatness. Here I thought with my two drive setup I would be in the big leagues. HA! Can you say small fish in a BIG pond? I am humbled.

Reformat? I am guessing that is when you need to re-install the OS or is this a fancy way of saying defrag?

Anyway, I never really thought about all the stuff posted here. Very cool stuff! When I get my next PC and if I can afford it I am getting what Jafo and Crae got (the set up will be a mixture of both).

Right now, I am so afraid of loosing my computer to a crash that I save what I can on CD. I don't want to even upload the SP2 yet and its just sitting in my Windows Update alert waiting to be downloaded. If I had the stuff you guys are talking about I wouldn't be so fearful.

I have 2 drives and an external one, Quickly lets establish our own countries lol.
Welcome to Guy Land lol

joetheblow it's not as bad as it might seem. Blowing out your box,or having a catastrophous crash is the way it goes, and the name of the game. It happens to everyone at least once. In my book it is almost cathartic. I have lost 50 to 75 GB of stuff in the blink of an eye, ya just shrug it off, cause when its' gone it's gone. I maen you can use an Undeleter Proggie, and sometimes it comes back. But the neat part about blowing it out or getting slammed with a unexpected data loss, is that each time you come back to the top, you redefine your stratagy and learn newer ways to organize your data, and structure your system so that it becomes more manageable and coherent. I mean at first ya let programs install, where they want to go... Then you start defining where you want them to go... Then you start catagorizing your Start Menu to make sense, and then you move the Temp File location and other files... Then you ask yourself "what is prefetch, and how do I turn it off!" Then you hit on the perfect combination of Core applications that just seem to cover ever aspect of what you do on a Puter. (Hint some folks never..never get out of the applications junkiehood) You come to recognize what makes a toxic install environment for a sytem. When you catch yourself recognizing program Turds and other things that are out of the Ordianry, or can spot a Service or running process, that is not normal and doesn't belong, or ya google something and then Hotbot it, and then Dogpile it, and then lycos it, and then MS Knowledgebase it, you come to discover that "There is no Spoon!"


/me now wanders off to contemplate the sanctity of /me own Navel Lint

CygnusXII - Hard Drive crashes do not happen to everyone.. I have yet to experience one. But then again on my 40 Gig HD I'm only using 7 to 9 gigs.

B can also be a ZIP drive.

I always partition my hard drive into a C: drive and a D: drive and keep nothing on the C: drive except the operating system. If by any chance, I might need to reinstall the OS, I only have to reformat the C: drive and lose nothing that is on D:
I also set My Documents to be on the D: drive and basically I save everything in folders I create in My Documents.

Physical harddrive failure is certainly not all that common.....it seemed to be more so in the past.

I had a 40 meg drive that constantly needed bad sector checking as it liked to 'grow them' on a regular basis.

These days in the bunch of drives I have on various comps....2 are bad-ish.  One, a 6gig will often fail to spin up without a 'slap' and is therefore too suspect to use 'seriously' [was given to me to fiddle with] and another, a bought 36gig started getting doddery after a year or two....would 'stall' when reading/writing to one particular section [probably a head-crash] so I partitioned the 'bad bit' out and removed it from any system config......about 20 gig is still working OK,,,,but again cannot be really 'trusted'....

I got caught back in the Westen Digital Grey Market, Black Market deals awhile back.
They claimed that a shipping container had been highjacked, and then Moved onto the reseller market. I had a bunch of them as I worked for a Reseller and OEM System Builder at the time. I have some older 4gb western Digitals that are invulnerable. and some old Winchester Drives that refuse to die. I keep them as Paperweights. I also have one of the Original HP External 2x Burners, in the closet that will not die. They do not build things like they used to. I got an all in one HP printer, under my desk from an Uncle, that crapped out almost imediately after my Uncle lost his reciept. I keep it because it has a good scanner on it with sheet feeder, attached. And get this the Jack-n-ape bought another one of the same make and model. I still use a Dot-Matrix (Impact Now)
printers. Actually I have several of them, a 24 pin Okidata that's lightning fast, a couple of 9 pin Panasonics, and a couple of 24 pin epsons. I love them and they work great for printing my daughters Homework. Children will run an injet color catridge into a hole in the ground.
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