Computer Upgrades

[MyV6Flys]

That I think is the per Beauty of them. I think they will be one of the next Big ticket Items people will be buying as much home photo's and movies are ending up on hard drives. Heck you can take the family photo album in your brief case. Pop it into any computer and play.

No backup........no pictures or movies for most people using there system to keep all that stuff.

[dazwan]

If you use different computers, then yes USB drives are good. One thing to make sure of though is the speed of the USB interface USB 1.1 (is it 1.1? I'm sure it is!) is way too slow for a HD. If you want to have a useable USB drive you'd be best off with USB 2.0 all round (the drive and the interface on the PC). It's a hell of a lot quicker, but is backwardly compatible with the slower USB 1.1.

Failing that go for Firewire (Sony calls this i-Link and I can't remember what Apple call it) it's fast and probably the better interface for things with huge data throughput.

For my next PC I'm after a laptop. I've seen a nice 3 GHz P4 baby to replace the old 500Mhz laptop and 2Ghz Desktop. That way I won't need to worry about portable drives, I'll just take the laptop with me. When that time comes the desktop will sit in the garage with a wireless card and serve my WiFi network.

[Jamesb4uk]

lol - defino want USB2 on an external HDD caddy's...

My boss got me a USB caddy for laptop hard drives. then procedded to ghost a 30gb partition over USB1.1

lets just say it coppied 1.5gb in about 3 hrs...

J

[vmail]

XP Home, get rid of it, use XP Pro, Win 2000 or Win 2003, had prob when settin up network drive on XP Home on my bros Laptop

? What problems have you had???

I've just built a system with XP home, and it networked fine (with my 2000 Pro laptop)

might have just been me, the network on the laptop was called MSHOME and the main one was called WORKGROUPS

[dj_davo]

and dont forget peeps that u can buy 4x dvd writers now for about £60 so there is really no excuse not to do regular backups. at 60p for 4.3 gb (u never get the 4.7 quoted).

i got a dual dvd-r and ram writer so just drag and drop to my ram

[vmail]

DVD films are written in a different way to data, 4.7gig for video and under 4.5gig for data, got my 8x writer for 95quid, (Trade price) writes in 7 mins where did you get your DVD-R from

[dj_davo]

got mine about a year ago from ebuyer, its a panasonic dual jobby, only 1x.

gonna get a new 4 or 8x multi one that writes to + and - r/rw

if ur doin films get a nice util like dvd decrypter, then squash up with dvd2one, to make it 4.3gig

only to backup your exisiting (legitimately bought) dvd's of course (cough)