O'ahu geek needed

I had a crisis with my Win95 machine yesterday; the video died, although I could see scandisk operate. Once that procedure completed the screen turned to diagonal mush. I thought it was a monitor problem, because it's been unreliable when powering up for a while (see here for details).

Anyway, I need a hardware geek to help me remove the hard drive from the old machine and hook it up to the new(er) machine as a slave drive, complete with ribbon cabling and jumper settings.

Ali's husband Tom has offered to talk me through it on the phone, but I'm nervous about that; I haven't opened a PC case since about 1988. So I need either a hand-holder while changing it over or a commercial outfit which will do it.

There are a few outfits in the Yellow Pages which claim to do this sort of thing "on-site," but I don't know if any of them are any good. Has anyone had any experience with any of those places or got any recommendations?

Thanks in advance.

Comments

I'm not sure on popular opinion, but the Supergeeks' techs are pretty good. However, I haven't been with them for over three years so the body supply may have changed. Yet keep in mind that chances are, they're much more expensive than other places.

You may also want to check out this guy.

The latter is $75/hour and SG is $125/hour. Unfortunately, both state one hour minimum. What you want done should only take a few minutes, sans testing and troubleshooting.

hth,
KT

I've heard good things about Supergeeks too, but I'm sure service comes with a premium. I imagine you already know to not go to CompUSA. For anything.

I believe in you, though! I'm sure with Ali's husband's guidance you could do it in a snap. While different computers have quirks relating to default master/slave settings and BIOS settings, for the most part it's a moderately simple affair to add a second hard drive. Here's one sample guide. A Google search might even turn up instructions specific to your PC.

Did the death of video just push an earlier plan to move the drive up a bit? That is, I'm guessing that at this point, trying to revive the old machine - with a different video card, or monitor - is pointless.

Folks, I looked at the Supergeeks website, and their rates are more than I want to pay unless I gotta. ComputerClinic in Aiea is $50/hr, which is tolerable, but the problem there is that they already have a two-day backlog this week, and I'd hafta leave it there till they get it done; it's first-come first-served, no appts.

Yeah, Ryan. The video loss pushed me over the edge; after all, Win95 is 8 years old and hasn't been supported in two years, I think. And that machine had a 3-gig hard drive; I was down to about 600-megs of space. The way bloatware goes, that could have been eaten up with two programs, and who knows what still works with Win95 anyway?

I appreciate Tom's (and Ali's) offer (and the machine) a lot; it's just my skill level I don't trust! We'll see, though.

Oh, yeah, since my Eudora mail program with all the correspondence is on the old drive, I can't even find Ali's phone number...Ali, if you read this, send me a note! ;)

step by step pics coming check ali's gallery ..

Scratch that. It's at http://www.paradiseali.com/bluecollargeek/hdtransfer.htm. :)

Wow! Anyone who wants to see a good how-to, take a look at that! Thanks, folks!

I don't know if you found a soulution to your problem, but I feel a civic duty to say, "STAY AWAY FROM CYBERTECH!" Or as I call him, the computer repairman from Hell.

I had a struggle getting the drive out of the old machine, but I found a Packard Bell usegroup on Google and posted a note there asking what I was missing in the removal (there's a serious dearth of information about old machines from the mfr). I got a response within three hours which solved the immediate problem. I'm now moving forward to putting it into the newer box.

Kane, tks for the heads-up.

If being able to retrieve e-mail counts as success, I've achieved it. Of course, I have duplicate copies of mail and virus programs on different hard drives now, and miscellaneous other glitches, but at least I'm a going concern.

I had to remove the CD-ROM drive to fit the old hard drive into the machine; anybody have any recommendations for a CD-RW drive I should get to replace it?

Post a Comment