This one owes us nothing, but it’s the desktop catchall in the net—we built this one from scratch, as I recall, and it’s got multiple disks and a lot of really outmoded software. It runs Win7 but it’s far from fast…and Jane and I took the day to try to figure the last part of the personal taxes, to get those off to the accountant.
We decided this time we’re SO late we’d either have to Express it all or just get clever, scan documents into pdf and get our accounting program to output to pdf and then ship all the pdfs down to our faithful accountant. It’s a lot of data. And the machine began to creak, if not to smoke. One disk was full. We moved to another. And the accounting software itself is so aged it threw the (newer) printer into frantically printing the same page over and over and over, more than 50 times, with me swearing all the way, before I could find somewhere in the software to pry its electronic fingers off that notion—I mean, ordinary cutoffs weren’t working. The thing would just lay back and wait its next chance to run more page 8’s. That’s when we decided that sending the files electronically would be cheaper and easier, and our accountant was ok with it.
So the next job is the business taxes, and we’re going to have to do something about that computer. I think I’ve found a reasonable one that’s certainly going to be better than what was state of the art in 2001. D’ya think?
3 year on site service policy, hd monitor, 500 gig hd, 4 gig ram, both our accounting softwares and Word included, Win 7 64 bit. And for less than half what we paid to build the creaking old monster ourselves back in 2001. Knowing the computer won’t crash with your data before you get the business taxes done? Priceless. One offering (extra charge) is a terabyte drive—I could be wrong, but seems to me it could actually slow you down. Finding anything on the 3 terabyte drives we have floating between computers is an artform. I think 500 gig should do it.
Lord, I remember the great fuss over the 20 g Winston drives our weather station had: I came into the news station for something or another (interview, I think) and we had literally to tiptoe past those fragile machines sitting on their carts in the hall, lest any vibration jar them…
Now one of our terabyte drives gets shoved flat by rampaging cats and we just set it up and keep going. I understand they’re a bit fragile…but so far, not.
This is our year to have our oldest electronics go. Jane’s laptop was a spring chicken, but she’s now up to speed, and the other, once repaired, will be a travel machine; the Panasonic 1000w microwave went; replaced that; now the 2001 computer. I wonder how long until the telly in my bedroom explodes…
For whatever it’s worth, I’m using WinXP on a two-year-old machine with a 150GB ‘system’ drive and a 1TB ‘data’ drive. Both are nearly empty – I think my total usage is still under 60GB. And my external backup drive is also 1TB. No problems so far….
Dunno, bout the Jupiter tapes, but I remember talking to some NASA people on early punch card recovery—the cards had gotten wet.
Hey, I used to be very good at splicing paper tape. The high speed readers of the day would invariably tear it at some point in time. To make it interesting, we couldn’t use the reel-to-reel on the reader at high speed. It was bucket to bucket from the floor and it would shoot the tape all across the room if we weren’t careful.
Ahh … those were the days, thankfully never to be repeated.
(And I’ve recovered, carefully, the odd coffee’d punch card.)
Ooh, that’s a memory I could live without recalling! The first machine I ever worked on was a mainframe that booted the initial few hundred bytes of the operating system from paper tape – enough to tell it which magnetic tape drive to read the rest of the OS from: so you looked after that tape, but as you say, inevitably it tore fairly regularly.
192KB mainframe supporting 32 data-entry terminals of data. We programmers could only get stuff compiled for a test run overnight. When it (equally inevitably) failed, then you got a hexadecimal core dump at the point of failure and looked through to see if a) you could see the exact (machine-code) 24-bit instruction that failed, and b) if it could be fixed by directly entering revised code into that address, in which you could just manage a second test run while the data-entry clerks were at lunch …
[Just finished rewatching the Game of Thrones episode where the king’s brother says something like: “were those the good old days where millions died in the civil war, or the good old days when the mad king murdered people at random, or the good old days when dragons burned whole cities”: sometimes early computing horror stories feel like that too ..]
cj and jane, really, check into mac refurb laptops, they can run a ‘virtual machine” of windows and they last a lot longer with less hassles overall than pc’s. i used to use pc’s, worked on them, had them at home, etc and having switched to a mac in 2008 i can only recommend the dependability of macs. the mac mini makes a great easy desktop if you have a good monitor and don’t need to edit a movie like avatar. the laptops are workhorses also. i have more issues with hubby’s 3 yr old hp laptop and our network and sometimes the windoz op system. if you get a refurb from apple’s site, with the service plan, it will take you a long way and over the years not only be cost efficient but hassle efficient which means less stress and mis-spent time….
just my $.02 long after the fact…
D
My first one in the late 80s was pieced together and I’ve never found a pre-built that had everything I wanted in it. I tend to upgrade parts as needed or I find a piece of “candy” I can’t do without (talked myself out of that new $600 graphics card). Hope you got the 1T upgrade on the HD and if you haven’t bought it yet, might want to see if you can up the RAM to 6-8g. Just upgraded memory in Mom’s machine and it helped a lot.
Remember ordering Mom’s first computer. Had a 40mg HD in it and that was one of biggest made at the time and we couldn’t see her needing more than that anyway. Was over $2k back in 1989…