Influenza_epidemic

time to get a *cough* apple computer

I guess your apple must be immune from power surges? Sorry, I fogot that it is a documented fact that apples never have hardware failures. Not to mention apple always supports the hardware they sell and never have any dissatisfied customers.

My friend is an apple user and his last three apples died on him suddenly, one after less than a year.

I have had a similar situation some years back, someone turned off a circuit breaker to do some electrical work without telling me and my computer was on when the power was cut and when they turned it back on my computer would not start. The power supply died from it although I happened to have a replacement power supply lying around my computer start but the OS would not run. Long story short I had bad RAM which I detected with memtest. I was able to boot into a Knoppix disc even with bad RAM and see the data on my hard drive was just fine. I replaced the RAM and that computer ran for several more years.

First I would try another video card if you have an extra or could get one from a friend or buy a cheap one to try.

Try memtest because if something fried your video card it could have got your RAM and that can cause all sorts of strange behavior.

Get a Knoppix boot disc to see if your data is OK and if your can boot into Knoppix without any strange behavior it could be your data or your OS.


This is why I buy old computers from eBay, just to have a spare machine for under a hundred dollars that can get Internet. Lately it is the cheap machine I just bought that I leave on for downloading and turn my expensive computers off.

I have been backing up my multimedia collection to hard drive for awhile now and have not had any hard drive failures. The only hard drive I lost was from a power supply that erupted into flames and fried the whole computer including the keyboard. A few years ago I found myself with an extra hard drive and a USB case and started storing my files there instead of burning to CD since the CD's had a possibility of failure and it took so long with the larger file sizes not to mention when I put the CD's away I had a tendency to not watch them ever again. Hard drives have faster access times and can be more convenient not to mention how cheap they have become.

The possibility of hard drive failure is something I think about and take seriously. My first step to avoiding disaster is buying name brand reputable drives from reputable places which are not much more expensive than some of the refurbished and no-name brands I have seen for sale. Second turn off the USB (or fire-wire) case when you are not using it, avoid wear and tear. DVD might be safer for some people but I don't have the time too burn that many discs and when it comes to watching them I would most likely never view most of them again. Hey, what can I say, I'm lazy. I just balance the perceived threat of hard drive failure with the ease of having my files at hand and the time I save from not burning everything which I just don't have time for.

I purchased my first laptop about a year and a half ago, a 15.4 inch widescreen Emachines 2501 for $799 at Best Buy and was probably more than I could afford at the time. The only reason that I considered the brand is the prices was the lowest of any of the laptops at the moment I had the money to buy it. It is a decision that is an individual one since one persons computer needs are not going to be anothers and the only real way to know what the correct answere is for you will be to have owned a laptop make the choice from experince. Once you buy the one you buy and use it for sometime will be when you know what you need and want from a laptop.

My advice is to decide if you want a portable computer or if you want to replace your desktop system. First you need to realise that the bigger much heavier widescreen laptops are not very portable, from my experince trying to use mine and are desktop replacements so if you are going to be using it like a laptop then you should figure on something smaller but if your are going to replace your desktop system then go for the seventeen inch model! Should you not want to replace you desktop go for a smaller one. I have used a much smaller gateway with a 14 inch screen at work to reprogram a wrapping machine and have come to the conclusion that you tend to get acclimated to the screen you are using... to a point.

As far as Operating Systems go you could also use Linux but I was unable to get any Linux distro to work with my sound card for this laptop and since my primary use for a computer is multimedia I am forced to use with this one. This was not that much of a problem untill my primary desktop system died a few months ago which ran a Linux OS and and all my USB harddrives happened to be formatted with a Linux file system. I had to find a free program for Windows that allowed my to transferre everything to NTFS from Reiser. That would have been much easier if I were using a more conventional Linux file system but I realy need to make everything more difficult than it should be.

I recently bought an IBM/Lenovo online and currently waiting for it to arrive. The deal was free shipping and a free 512MB RAM upgrade (customer installed), the RAM arrived thursday! The Thinkpad should be more Linux friendly so I will spend another weekend tranferring everything I have downloaded for the last year or two from one harddrive format to another.

I am caucasian (white) born in California. My fathers family is very Irish which means red hair and freckles and my mothers family is from the south with a mix that includes Cajun so she looks dark complected and is often mistaken for Mexican or Hispanic. Since I spend way too mucj time on the computer or watching movies when I am not working I am very pale.