Tag: windows

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#firstworldproblems

Here's the replacement...
Here’s the replacement…

A few weeks ago, on a Thursday night, I was playing XCOM on my Windows box.  Everything was running smoothly, no problems.  On Friday, I got home and turned on the computer to listen to some music and, for some odd reason, the hard drive wasn’t detected.  As in, the hard drive containing the Windows OS wasn’t even there, so far as the system was concerned.

Thankfully, I only stored Windows and some replaceable programs on the drive that failed (an SSD), and my pictures, music, and videos were all stored on a separate hard drive (a traditional HDD).  Typically when one uses an SSD (or “solid state drive”), you only run programs on it as they can take advantage of the speeds afforded by SSD technology, while slower traditional hard drives (“HDD”) are just fine for other stuff.  So really, all I lost in the drive failure were a few programs (that I could re-install) and some game save files (or so I thought…).

Also, thankfully, the drive was still under warranty.  I’ve had it for less than a year, so I contacted the manufacturer, sent the drive in (last Tuesday) and got the replacement (last Saturday), which is a pretty quick turn-around.  On Saturday, I spent my time re-installing the drive and getting some of those programs back on, but this time, I installed Windows 8 rather than Windows 7 (hey, if I’ve got to re-install everything, I may as well try out the new hottness, right?).  Microsoft is trying to get everyone to upgrade, so they’ve had it on sale for $40, which is a pretty good deal compared with the regular price of $120 (which Win8 will return to after January 31st).  I may write more about Windows 8 later but, for now, it’s “alright.”  My mind isn’t blown.  If you’ve got Windows 7, you’re fine sticking with 7, but 8 isn’t horrible (and it boots really fast).

I mentioned that I lost a few game save files, and this was the worst part of the experience.  I’d put about 9 hours of time into XCOM since picking it up months ago, so I wasn’t looking forward to having to repeat the lost time.  Also thankfully, the program I use to manage the game (Steam) backed the save files up to “the cloud,” meaning that once I re-installed the program, my save files were also re-downloaded and restored.

In the end, I lost nothing except for a week of using my Windows-based computer.  All in all, not a bad deal.  And we had the Linux box (that this site runs on…) to use in the meantime.

As a side-note, having no Windows PC to use, and thus, no computer to run iTunes, I couldn’t update my iPod for listening to podcasts during that week.  Instead, I relied upon my cell phone (an HTC One X) for downloading new podcasts and music.  To be honest, I kinda don’t want to go back to the iPod.  I’ve gotten used to downloading podcasts and music immediately from work (or wherever), rather than waiting to go home, turn on the Windows PC, download the podcast or music to the computer, then transfer it to the iPod: it’s much easier to just do it directly.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a way to use my phone in my car, except for relying on the phone’s speakers (which aren’t really loud enough).

Oh well.

#firstworldproblems

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To SSD, or not to SSD?

Last year, my laptop died.  Rather than replace it, I opted for upgrading my desktop PC to make it gaming-capable, among other things, as it tends to be far cheaper and is much, much easier to upgrade when components go on sale.  At the time, I did the bulk of the upgrades, but I didn’t get new hard drives, as they were still functional and I didn’t think they were as important to spend extra cash on when I could put that money into a new processor or RAM.  So, since that time, I’ve been using a previous-generation hard drive on my next-generation motherboard.

The drive I was using was 160 GB, so not exactly a large capacity to work with.  As lots of stuff is moving toward cloud-based storage, and as we have a 400 GB external hard drive, 160 GB was still enough to do most things, though it felt “cramped” at times.  Hard drives are relatively cheap things to upgrade, where you can get a 1 terabyte hard drive (that’s 1000 GB) for about $100, and frequently cheaper.  However, that upgrade would give me all kinds of capacity, but not a huge jump in “speed.”

There are a variety of reasons for this, but part of it is that traditional hard drives actually have spinning parts, much like a record player.  As an illustration, in the image above, you can see the compact disc-looking thing, and what also looks like a needle.  Obviously, the drive’s operation is far more complicated than “it’s just like a compact disc,” but in many ways, that’s really all it’s doing.  Bigger and faster, but the same basic concept (well, and without lasers…).

Enter the “solid state drive,” or “SSD.”  Unlike a regular hard drive, this one has no moving parts.  In fact, it works much more similarly to the SD card you put in your camera.  For this reason, these guys tend to be fast in comparison with a traditional drive.  However, the cost is also far higher when in a “price per gigabyte” paradigm.  The highest volume SSD I can find sits at 960 GB, and is running $3,150 right now.

In order to run Windows and an array of programs (comfortably), you need over 100 GB, and then a second drive to store your pictures, videos, music, documents, and so on.  Thus, when this 120 GB drive from Mushkin hit $100, I was ready to take the plunge.  $100 for 120 GB was my “benchmark” price for such a thing, when it would be worth it to spend the cash on a low-capacity device when I could get 1 TB in a traditional drive for the same money.

After some hiccups concerning the cable I was using, I finally got the thing installed this past Sunday, up and running with Windows 7 Ultimate, a variety of games and “useful” programs, and a formatted 160 GB traditional hard drive (my old one) to be used exclusively for media storage.  In running a Windows-based test on my various components, where the old hard drive was definitely limiting in my overall performance, now my drive is the fastest thing in there, and my processor is what’s lagging (though not my much).  The computer boots up and is ready to use in about 20 sec, which is far faster than the minutes it used to take.

Overall, I’m a believer.  Where people used to say “add some RAM to ‘pep up’ that old computer,” the SSD is, increasingly, what people are going to suggest.  For $100, you can improve your computer’s speed to a ridiculous degree, turning it into the speed demon it once was when you first bought it.