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Finally got the laptop running again.

Captain Kilowatt

Professional Amateur
Staff member
Apr 6, 2005
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Nova Scotia,Canada
Man the last week and a half were rough. The phone is OK for checking the forum while away or at work but it really does suck for anything serious. The day before the Easter weekend I lost the hard drive in my laptop. I was launching Google Earth and stood up to reach for the TV remote and when I sat back down my screen was black with a cursor flashing in the top left corner. A quick check revealed my HDD had crashed. Because of the holiday weekend it took several days to get a new drive.I ordered it from a buddy of mine that does computer repair and networking services etc. and told him I was fine reinstalling the operating system from my recovery discs and he would try and recover my crashed data and files. I attempted several times to reinstall Windows but it kept stopping near the end.Turns out the recovery discs that were created by the vendor when I bought the computer were corrupt. :headbang Back to Dave for help. Eventually I was able to get back up and running with about 98% of my old data recovered and a better version of Windows 7 that Dave was able to load for me. It feels great to be back online with a 17 inch screen instead of fat fingering a tiny little touch screen on a phone. now i am in the process of reloading all my recovered data and reorganizing it as it was really a mess before. that shouldn't take much more than a month or so. :D
 

NO. Good SSD's are about four times the price of a comparable sized HDD. At $400 for a 500Gb drive NO WAY! Cheaper SSD's are out there but they are not as good. I have a portable HDD for back up. The irony is that I had a back up on that drive but wiped the entire drive for a project just two days before my laptop crashed. That won't happen again I guarantee.
 
Create a good "virgin" image, all drivers, all updates / patches, etc. Load up the software you want, and your files, and STOP there. Get an old drive put it in an external enclosure, and CREATE AN IMAGE. You can use norton ghost, or if you want a freebee, Drive XML works pretty good as well.

If anything ever happens, or it crashes, you can just pop in a new drive "image it up" and be back and going within an hour, tops.
 
A ~100gb SSD drive sells for about ~$100 around here. An external 1Tb drive is way less than $100. Soooo, use the ultra-fast SSD drive to run the OS and use the external drive to store whatever the OS doesn't need. Net result? A very fast boot up and quick response for calling up programs with the SSD, and storeroom to spare with the external drive. Not to mention that the SSD is invulnerable to the shocks and tumbles that renders a standard drive failure in a laptop. I've had this happen to me before; so I already know - BTW.

Food for thought . . .
 
That works... now depending upon the amount of physical RAM you have, turn off the swap file if you're using windows, or at the least, set it to a fixed size to keep it from constantly expanding and then shrinking which causes fragmentation. I personally like to use two drives, one for the OS, one for file storage and the swap file.

And don't forget to image it up as I mentioned earlier.
 
A ~100gb SSD drive sells for about ~$100 around here. An external 1Tb drive is way less than $100. Soooo, use the ultra-fast SSD drive to run the OS and use the external drive to store whatever the OS doesn't need. Net result? A very fast boot up and quick response for calling up programs with the SSD, and storeroom to spare with the external drive. Not to mention that the SSD is invulnerable to the shocks and tumbles that renders a standard drive failure in a laptop. I've had this happen to me before; so I already know - BTW.

Food for thought . . .


$100 for a 100Gb SSD drive while I paid $94 taxes in for a 500Gb HDD. That's what I meant by the BIG price difference. I checked Futureshop and others and $399.99 for a 500Gb SSD was the going rate. As for an internal SSD drive and an external HDD, well that sort of defeats the portability and convenience of laptop. I simply fell victum to bad timing with having wiped my back up for a special quick project just two days before an unexpected crash and then the recovery discs were corrupt from the start.
 

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