Exec,

Having had those two Computer Doctor PC's for about a month now I can report total satisfaction. Thanks for the suggestion.

My current wonder is whether I ought to have spent a bit more cash and had them fit the hard drives into those front loading trays.

I am backing up daily with Acronis in the hope that it can get me going again quickly after the (so called) inevitable disk crash. Snag is that although it is validating everything it does the gurus all say that the only way to prove it is working is to try a full recovery. To do that means taking out the working disk and swopping it with a fresh one (I bought a spare from CD's). But what if I screw that operation up? So much safer to take a disk out of a tray and pop another one in.

I'm tempted to see if CD's will put a couple of trays into the two machines if I drive them up to Northampton.

What do you think?

TP

TP
How very nice to hear this TP. :-)

These guys are definitely not your actual 'whiz kid, geeky types', just a solid small business, selling good stuff at reasonable prices and giving an excellent service to boot (pardon the pun).

I'm sure they would oblige with your requirements if it is possible, but best to chat with them first and set it up, eh? The connectors and making the connections being the main problems to overcome, I would think.

TP

if you want some hard drive trays, check these out from Amazon.

Thanks Opt,

But I could never fit one myself.

However, you did suggest some form of external drive holder a while ago and that might be a way of testing my recovery potential.

Yes?

TP

TP

If you transfered your drives into those adaptors then it would enable you to easily swap drives (and therefore safely test your backup strategy), but it does make it a bit easier for a burglar to steal your data.

I have used those trays and they work fine. They are the cheapest that I have found by a long way, and also have 2 fans in each which should improve disk reliability. If you want to play around, buy some and get your machine supplier to fit them.

My Viper PC has a sticker on the back, which acts as a case seal. If it is broken, and it has to be to in order to gain access to the innards of the machine, then it advises that this will invalidate the Warranty. I guess yours is the same?

I think the reality is, that to go inside the case, you have to know what you are doing. If something were to go wrong, then it would be the customer's articulate skills, when describing what he did and how he did it to the dealer (ie. showng the level of his techical knowledge, practical skills and ability), which would be the actual determining factor concerning any potential claim under a warranty.

At some time in his PC using life, a user has to make a decision as to whether it is best to start learning 'the hard way' - and perhaps risking extra expense, in order to gain 'inside the PC case knowledge'.

Go on TP! Stuff the risk and the dangers! Risk losing some money and "open the box!"

:-)

There are plenty of helpful web sites out there, one being You Tube with its videos, which will advise on everything from what tools to get (eg, 'a grounding strap'), to how to go about doing the job in hand.

Go on! Go for it!

:-)

A PC may have a label purporting to invalidate the guarantee if the case is opened but I doubt that that would be enforcable.

Computers are designed to be customizable and there are many legitimate reasons for opening the case. Therefore the condition printed on the seal would be deamed an unfair condition and therefore void.

Thanks for the vote of confidence, Exec !!

CD's have mailed back that they have some Drive Caddies coming in and that they can fit one to each of my PC's.

The more I think of what things cost (less than a tenner for a Caddy) and what is most likely to fail on a PC (the disk or the power unit) I am surprised at why not more people are encouraged to mount their hard drives in caddies. Especially if Acronis is all that it is cracked up to be. And all the other disk cloning software like it.

Yes, lots of people put price before convenience, but when you think of the palaver you have to go through when (as it almost inevitably does) the hard drive fails it must be better to fit one that you can swop without opening up the PC.

Or maybe I am missing something.

TP

I've never had a drive fail. Fans are the most failure-prone component, I've probably replaced three of them. In fact many are only built to last a couple of years if you keep your PC on 24/7. Also the fan inside the power supply, which can be replaced with a bit more tinkering without having to replace the whole power supply.

A couple of weeks ago I asked if anyone had found a way of getting Acronis to turn off a PC after doing a backup.

Here is how to do it with Vista.

(Kayak. Sadly it was when the fan failed on my studio PC, and I tried to replace the power unit myself, that I managed to thrash my hard drive!)

TP

Kayak, interesting that you havnt had a drive fail, I have had 2 fail in the last 3 weeks, one of them had run non stop in my NAS for 3 years so I am not complaining about that. I used the failure to replace all 4 disks in the NAS with new 500GB drives.

And then ...... one of the new drives failed after about 30 hours !

We inherited a PC system with a bigger (then I use on my Mac) Monitor over the W/E.

Question is will the PC Monitor work with my Mac processor?

The monitor is a Gatway VX900. 18inch (measuring corner to corner). to many Ref. Nos. on the back to quote. I did notice that the lead from the PC monitor has a 15 holed pin coming out while my present Mac monitor lead comes straight out. My guess is it won't work but I don't know. Seem to think that this question has been answered on here but to many posts to go back on to find.

Stan, not sure it looks as though the gateway monitor does not have an digital input.

I use a Dell 24" Screen as a second monitor with my iMac 24" but thats a digital connection and only needed a lead from the apple shop.

Thanks S/M, do you think that if the gateway connection is not digital that I can get a non-digital lead one end and a digital the other end going into the Mac? or is that not possible? Maplins have just opened a store locally so I would go there 1st for convenience.

ED: The monitor is 8 years old, but hardly used.

Just in:

This is a customer service message from the Computer Doctors Ltd.

Over the last few weeks we have had an increasing number of customers that have purchased a program over the internet called Antivirus XP 2008.

THIS IS NOT A GENUINE PRODUCT AND YOU SHOULD NOT RELEASE YOUR CREDIT CARD DETAILS TO THIS COMPANY.

You can pick up this malware from many compromised websites , it will disable your PC, then promise to fix the problem for a fee of between 49.95 and 104.85.

Because it is well designed and looks like a genuine Microsoft product many people have paid up for the convenience.

We believe that Microsoft are going to release a statement regarding this product, but we thought that our customers would be interested to hear this information as soon as possible.

The product is not easy to remove, but we have had some success in removing it and its re-installer. If you get infected please give us a call (or any other competent repairer) to remove this program.

Regards

Customer services

Computer Doctors Ltd

whats the story on SP3 for XP at the mo - my XP just tried to update it automatically and i cancelled it as some time ago i saw peeps were having problems

Spaceman asked me to ask a silly question.

If I set my chart background to black, will it conserve energy and make the monitor live longer?

Maddoctor

I've been using XP SP3 for some months with no problems. MM reported a DHCP problem some time ago, but that does not effect everybody. It may well have been sorted by now but in anycase, there was a simple workaround.

Optimist , thanks for your comments

Am also using SP3 on my laptop with no problems so far (Downloaded about a month ago). To be honest, I can't see any visible difference from the old to the new.