The End is Near -- Please help me prepare

Poststructural Pub
1

I received ominous intimations that the end may, in fact, be near. The little fan on my power supply went from making unpleasant grinding noises to slowing intermittently to stopping intermittently . . . and then it stopped completely and my power supply sort of went up in smoke.

Gateway kindly shipped me a new one, complete with a 20-page instruction booklet, and, unable to procrastinate any further, I drew a diagram of where all the wires and plugs went – there were a half-hundred of them – removed the old one and replaced it with the new.

It wasn’t nearly as difficult as I had imagined. My fears and procrastinations had been because of previous experiences inside computers, which had always required tools that I either did not have or could not find. This Gateway is tool-less, with everything held in place with little sliding clips, so that I did not have to spend the usual three hours driving about town trying to find a screwdriver. Nor did everything have to be removed to get at the power supply and plugs. I had to slide one drive about a bit, but that was all.

I’d like to compliment Gateway on a fine design and excellent service. Their email tech support instantly recognized the problem from my description – "The little fan thing is going whirr real fast then not so fast then real fast again . . . " – without needing to ridicule me or ask me to do anything technical-sounding. They honored the warranty and simply sent out a replacement by FedEx.

In fact, I didn’t even need to tell them my serial number! They queried my computer for it and its components. Warranty service could not have been easier.

But, I digress.

This event has convinced me that Bad Things May Happen. It has reminded me that I’ve never backed anything up. And I’m not likely to be able to do so because . . . I do not know what kind of disks to purchase.

I’ve looked at Sam’s and Office Depot and was overwhelmed by the variety and assortment of CDs on the shelf. Somehow, in my mind, I was thinking I needed something called a “CD.” In fact, I need to choose from among about a hundred things that are all labelled “CD-*Xl@&#@@@!!(LLCW.”

Can someone help me with this, please?

I have a CD drive that reads and writes and is a DVD player.

What do I need?

My ignorance isn’t entirely my fault. Well, not unless you count “stupid” as being my fault. I bought a low-end system thinking I’d never need to do more than email, internet, and reading software on a CD. Hence, I’ve never needed CDs because I thought I had only a CD-R. Turns out that what was on the receipt is not what was in the computer. I bought a low-end system, but got something a bit better–probably because that’s what they had in the store at the time (someone had refused it) and it was less of a loss to sell it to me at the cost of the lesser system than to ship it back.

I wondered why I’d never come close to filling up the memory . . .

2

CD-Rs will probably work out fine…if you have a manual, you’ll want to find out the speed of writing. That’s the most important factor.

If your burner only burns at 4X, you wouldn’t want to wast the money getting 16-speed CD-Rs. There are a lot of different brands, but most CD-R’s are produced by something like only 3-4 factories in the world, so they’re nearly all identical anyway.

You might consider CD-RW if your burner supports it..CD-RW lets you erase and re-use the cds a few hundred times.

And if you have a DVD-R (dvd burner) even better…you can put up to 4.6 gigs on a backup, instead of 600 megs on a CD (though some brands will hold 800 megs)

3

Hmmm . . . this is what it is: CD-RW/DVD Combo Drive . . . HLDS 32X/10X/40X CD/RW - 16X DVD Combo Drive [Part #5502414]

Now you see why I’m confused.

I thank you for your assistance, Wanderer. That gives me exactly what I need to go shopping!

4

Ok..i looked up the part number..you don’t have a DVD burner.

But your CD RW supporst 32 write, 10 rewrite speed

So if you wanted, you could blank CDRW discs that wrote 32x, or those ones that say “all speeds supported”, etc. if you didn’t want to spring for the extra bucks for CDRW, you could still get CDRs up to 32x

You don’t really wanna buy CDRs that are less than 32x, because then it’ll just take longer to burn your CDs.

5

You’re a dear, Wan!

OK, so I’m off to Sam’s now . . . bananas, cranberry juice, Kleenex, and CD-RW 32x’ers.

I feel much better already!

6

I’d suggest, to save archive disk space, that you just back up data and ignore the programs. If you’re good and true (and I have no reason to doubt), you have your original program disks and can reinstall in case the hard drive turns up its toes. If you downloaded programs, save those files and a little text file of the serial number or whatever key comes with it on disk too.

It’s the data, though, that no one else has but you, and is irreplacable. Jeez, I kept my last set of hard drives and turned them into secondary storage in my next computer. I deleted all the outdated Windows stuff sitting around taking up disk space.

Of course, you can’t do that if your hard drive just up and dies. Then you have to pay someone to see if they can extract your data.

M

7

Right. It’s just the data that I need. I have the software disks.