instalation of IE8 killed XP machine HELP!

[aczlan]

3 PSUs in 12 systems is a high % rate...
You didn't mention the cause of failure of the drives...The most common cause of failure to mobo's is power (surge) issues...
20 years ago a 20 MB hard drive was considered large...and exteneded memory was measured in KB (e.g 286,386,486)

FWIW...
power surges are the primary cause of failures in all devices that have component PCBs..."surge protectors" are not lightning protectors...The best electrical protection is with the use of UPS units

Well, I have replaced three power supplies in the last 10 years among the 20 or so computers me, my family or friends have owned, one was my machine, it was a Thermaltake one (450W) that cooked 3 80gb drives (replaced under warranty) and finally cooked the motherboard, it and the motherboard were replaced in 2005, at the time the system was 4-5 years old.
I replaced one last year in a friends emachines PC that also fried the motherboard, the HD was good and with a new motherboard and PSU I have another computer (it was also 3-5 years old).
I also replaced one in a whitebox PC that we had at work (it was ~3 years old and was flaky for a few months before it died).

In all of these I have not yet had a bad hardrive other than the ones caused by a bad PSU.

Aaron Z

 

[2manyrocks]

I know you aren't supposed to handle an external hard drive roughly. Are there any other tips about using an external USB hard drive to make sure that backup data doesn't get lost?

 

[/pine]

I know you aren't supposed to handle an external hard drive roughly. Are there any other tips about using an external USB hard drive to make sure that backup data doesn't get lost?

Not exactly sure which type if USB drives you mean...

Flash drives or "thumb" drives are one example...then there are stand alone "external hard drives" with a USB interface...

What I prefer is using what is know as a "hard drive enclosure"...this is a device that allows you to interchange IDE or SATA hard drives (of any size) and connects via a USB...the advantage of this over stand alone external drives is it is very easy to swap out hard drives...another advantage is if Windows gets corrupted (as was the topic of the OP) the hard drive can be removed from the system and placed in a hard drive enclosure and once connected to a working system data can be extracted (a similar alternative is to slave the drive)
USB hard drive enclosures start at about $25

The only drives I have had a problem with heavy handling is 2.5 inch laptop drives...they do no like to be bounced around...

 

[smitty9266]

to open links in the same window but a new tab HMMMM...
OK lets see if you can follow ....
open IE
go to tools menu
then Internet options
general
settings
tabs settings
open links from other programs in
a new tab current window

Should work

Jeff

 

[MossRoad]

to open links in the same window but a new tab HMMMM...
OK lets see if you can follow ....
open IE
go to tools menu
then Internet options
general
settings
tabs settings
open links from other programs in
a new tab current window

Should work

Jeff

Hey! What are you trying to do here.... answer one of the original questions or something???

 

[MossRoad]

I can only remember losing maybe 3-4 motherboards in the past 5-6 years at work. Really happy with that. I've only lost 1 at home. That was the day all the lights in the house went brown, the furnace fan made a horrible groan, we heard a loud growl outside the house as the same thing happened to every house in the neighborhood.... then all the lights went really, really bright then everything went off with a boom! Someone had hit a power pole a few blocks over and two legs got crossed, uncrossed and crisscrossed!!!

 

[2manyrocks]

Hey! What are you trying to do here.... answer one of the original questions or something???

Are you implying this thread needs to be defragmented?

 

[/pine]

answer one of the original questions or something???

original???
I could be mistaken but I didn't think the question of tabs came up until the 5th page in this thread (post #43)...

I realize the thread did not stay 100% on topic but the gist of the OP was about not being able to boot a system and being able to retrieve data...this led to the issue of backing up data in the event of of HDD crashes/failures...

 

[MossRoad]

original???
I could be mistaken but I didn't think the question of tabs came up until the 5th page in this thread (post #43)...

I realize the thread did not stay 100% on topic but the gist of the OP was about not being able to boot a system and being able to retrieve data...this led to the issue of backing up data in the event of of HDD crashes/failures...

Page 5? You only displaying 10 posts a page?

 

[aczlan]

Page 5? You only displaying 10 posts a page?

The threads are much easier to read when there are 40 or so posts per page.

Aaron Z