The time has come... Old computer

[Richard King]

I have three computers at home, an old 866Mhz machine, a more current 2.5Ghz machine (this one) and a laptop that is used on my network from the recliner :). The old computer is TERRIBLY slow at anything. It takes about 15 minutes to do a reboot and many times freezes up "thinking" about what to do when I tell it to do something. The old beater has a nice case (Antec) with 4 x 5 1/4" and 2 x 3.5" bays in the front. I moved the inards from the original case into this one when I added a 3rd hard drive and the old PS couldn't handle it. THIS computer (the 2.5G machine) is a Compaq and has a dvd-r drive and a cd player in it's two (only) larger bays and a floppy in it's one small bay. My question is can I take the innards from the Compaq and move them to the other box and take the main drive from the crap machine and place it in either the Compaq box or an external enclosure and still access the info on the drive even though it is currently my boot drive? My thought it that I could do this so long as I make the old drive a slave rather than master. I would probably move the PS from the Compaq also since I know that all the components work well together. I have one of these: http://www.soyousa.com/products/proddesc.php?id=301 that I would like to place in a third 5 1/4" bay.

Is there any hope for my little home project?

[Steve Mehs]

I know I’m not answering your question Richard but, 866 MHz slow? What are you trying to do? I'm running a 700 MHz Compaq with 2 hard drives. My master drive is a 13GB that runs Windows 2000 Pro SP4 and a 10 GB partitioned into 2 5GB partitions one for Windows XP Pro SP2 and Windows 2003 Server SP1. I have it maxed out a 384 MB PC100 SDRAM and a crappy 8MB video card. State of the art machine from 1999 :) The thing runs beautifully except for a minor startup problem with Zone Alarm Pro and the Linksys Network Monitor where it takes a few seconds extra to load on the 2000 side but is fine with XP and 2K3.

I use the computer for periodic photo editing with Photoshop and web creation with Dreamweaver. It’s a little sluggish but for what it has (or doesn’t have) it’s okay. I’d rather use this 3.20 GHz computer, but when it’s burning DVDs or I’m download massive files I just use the older one and save it to a network folder. My mom use the computer for casual web surfing, email and Word. On the XP side web pages load much faster then with 2000. Even before I started using IE7. On 2003, other then the inital install of Active Directoy it's okay, but then again it's a server OS, so it just sits there :)

[Richard King]

Well, obviously there is something wrong with the old computator and I don't have the knowledge to bring it back. I just obtained a new 300G external drive. I guess I could simply move everything to that and reformat the drive in the beater computator. Would that be a better move? The trouble with that is that I would have to come up with my XP disc for that machine from where ever it might be. :(

[Redster]

Most certainly you can. That is the best way I have found to recover files from a pc that has crashed and is not worth saving. The drive when set as a slave will not be seen as the bootable but will have all files accessible to windows.

[Richard King]

I think moving the current inards to the other box and doing the master on the old one as a slave on the new one is probably my best move because I would gain the slots in the box. But then, do I want to live dangerously? :lol: External drive enclosures are getting quite reasonable now. Also, after moving my stuff to the good box, I could take the remaining large bay and make it a swappable drive bay. I sort of like that idea too. Ah, options.
I think I may order one of these things: http://www.newegg.com/product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16817121113&CMP=OTC-Froogle&ATT=KINGWIN+KF-72-BK+Black+HDD+Mobile+Rack

[HD921]

I think moving the current inards to the other box and doing the master on the old one as a slave on the new one is probably my best move because I would gain the slots in the box. But then, do I want to live dangerously? :lol: External drive enclosures are getting quite reasonable now. Also, after moving my stuff to the good box, I could take the remaining large bay and make it a swappable drive bay. I sort of like that idea too. Ah, options.
I think I may order one of these things: http://www.newegg.com/product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16817121113&CMP=OTC-Froogle&ATT=KINGWIN+KF-72-BK+Black+HDD+Mobile+Rack


If you already know what you're going to do, why waste people's time asking

[Richard King]

Gee, thanks for the very helpful advise. I am open to options and trying to educate myself on the options.