Page 5 of 5 FirstFirst ... 345
Results 41 to 47 of 47

Thread: running w7 as limited

  1. #41
    Junior Member goreswife's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jan 2009
    Location
    Michigan
    Posts
    12
    I figured I might as well just explain what happened myself, since it's easier that way. This happened quite a while back. I think it was somewhere around 1998 or 1999. I had no money for a new box at the time, my mother agreed to pay for it, as long as I bought it from the store that was located in the lobby of the college I was going to at the time. If my memory's good, I was running slack at the time.

    When I ordered the machine, I brought in my hdd, that I'd pulled out of my old box, and asked the guy to throw it in the new box, I told him not to touch the data, that it wasn't Windows readable, to just put it in and leave it alone.

    It's been a while and I'm not sure exactly how much stuff I had on there, but if my memory's good, there was roughly 1 gig of mp3s on there, all downloaded on DIALUP, in other words, I'd invested a LOT of time into getting those and well most of them weren't exactly common stuff, I don't listen to mainstream bands generally speaking.

    Soooo, when I went to pick up the new box, the guy tells me: "Oh, by the way, I couldn't read the hdd you gave me, so I just formatted it.". At that point, it took everything I had not to reach across the counter and choke the guy. I was pissed, and that's a huge understatement. He offered to drive me home, I took him up on the offer, cuz well I didn't really feel like carrying the machine on the subway. The idiot had the guts to try and flirt with me.

    Also, when I ordered the machine, I told the guy to make sure that I got an actual modem and not a "winmodem". I explained why and everything, to make sure that he understood that I was serious. After I got home and hooked everything up, I realized I couldn't get online, the idiot had given me a "winmodem" despite the fact I'd made it clear I didn't want one.

    I never set foot in that store again, there was no way in hell I'd ever buy anything from them after that, whenever I'd need something for class, like a floppy disk or whatever, I'd walk the 10 blocks or so to get to Futureshop, just so they wouldn't make another penny off me.

    I just seem to have the worse luck with this kind of stuff, another time, I upgraded one of my machines, but I was super busy at the time, and well the store I got the parts from offered a free install, so I figured I'd let them install everything. (Swapped CPU, added ram & a new burner) That store was about a 30-40 minutes drive away, but their prices were so low that it was worth it, or so I thought. They called me on a Friday to say I could pick up my machine the next day, but my mom was in town for the weekend, so I told them it'd have to wait til Monday.

    When I went to pick up my machine on Monday, they said it wasn't ready, even though they'd called the previous Friday to say that it was. Turns out that someone had walked in to buy a burner, and they gave him mine, since it was the last one they had and ordered another one for me. I ended up driving there I think 4-5 times, which cost me enough in gas that the money I'd saved on the parts was gone. In the end, I had to snap at the guy and curse him out to finally get my machine back. He ended up giving me a different burner, that cost more, but I refused to pay the difference, since well they should not have sold the one I'd bought to someone else in the first place.

    After that last one, I did all my upgrades myself. The only reason I'd let them do it was that well that semester I had 4 programming classes, so I didn't exactly have much free time at all.
    Out there in the darkness, they're coming after me, a thousand stalking zombies, they want my brains to feed.

  2. #42
    HYBR|D
    Guest
    Why did you pull the Hdd out of your old machine, take it into the computer shop and hand it to the guys who were selling you a new machine?

  3. #43
    Senior Member gore's Avatar
    Join Date
    Oct 2002
    Location
    Michigan
    Posts
    7,177
    Yea I was confused because I thought it was while She was working, but, in reality, I now know from asking it was when She was in College at the time, not work, so I kinda messed up on my details.

    So, basically, I ****ed up and thought it was when She was working, but, She was at school at the time. As for the HD, She said basically since they were going to be doing the machine, She may as well have them toss the drive in too as it was easier that way.

    I still think it's amazing though, that Her Mom, who's totally Computer, Phone, and electronics illiterate, decided to say that the only way She'd pay for a new Computer was if my Wife went to THAT store. Which is sort of stupid.

    My Wife said that when she was setting up the order, the guy said "If You have a HD already and want to use it, just bring it in, and we'll put it in for You". So, that is the reason.

    The fact that She took the time to tell them NOT to try reading the disk, and leave it alone, and told them She was NOT running Windows, and that She did NOT want a Win Modem that wouldn't work under Linux, and, got a ****in Win Modem, AND the drive formatted, is amazing to me. I can't understand how these parasites stay in business....Other than their ability to totally rip off old ladies who don't know anything, and, screw customers.

    I remember when I was first getting into Computing, I didn't know anything, as I had just bought a Computer, and I wanted more RAM at one point and needed a new Power Supply.

    Well, I took my Computer to this store, and told them what I wanted. I expected it to be done and no big deal, and, instead, they charged me like a hundred dollars and said they "cleaned the Power Supply I had, and installed the RAM".... I couldn't understand why the **** these *******s did it because obviously I couldn't do the work; I was just starting out.

    That place is out of business now, and I'm not even a little shocked about that. getting some RAM installed, is easy for me now, but, back when I didn't know the case could be opened by normal people, or much else really, and, so, I paid people to install hardware for me, and, when I got the receipt back with the hand written note saying they'd only cleaned the broken one, I was a little annoyed.

    My Wife just told me that when this was all going on, it was before She had worked tech support, and still had Faith in Humanity lol.

  4. #44
    HYBR|D
    Guest
    Back in the day you had to boot into an OS and look up device manager to spot if it was a winmodem card or not, as they were darn near identical cards, and manufactured by the same company.

    As your wife mentioned she mainly was pissed about the warezed mp3's that were lost so it wasn't as though she lost important corporate documents..

    Still scratching my head on WHY she handed over the drive, she was going to have to configure the PC when she got it home, so it would of taken a few extra mins to pop the case, remove new HDD & insert original drive, then insert the slack disc and do a repair installation, as she would of been using a different hardware spec'd system and i those days it wasn't so simple.

    and even in those days people knew to make backup's of that data. Especially when your getting a different system and want to carry over the hdd into the new system. Especially in 98 /99 as *nix wasn't as main stream as it is today so it was more trial & error when messing around in a terminal..

  5. #45
    Senior Member gore's Avatar
    Join Date
    Oct 2002
    Location
    Michigan
    Posts
    7,177
    My Wife didn't always do back ups, but after the last thing that happened where I was up all night trying to find why a Windows Update had basically destroyed the ability to boot Windows, which, Microsoft admitted was a known issue, we decided that a Network Disk is the better solution since we're getting to the point now that we have too much Data to back up just on my FTP Server and my USB HD, and, well, the ZIP Drive I have is nice, but at 100 MBs per disk, the 12 I have isn't anywhere near enough. The HD space we have is good, but, my FTP Server, I don't have enough room to back up everything, so, I backed up the most important stuff we have, and also made copies just in case.

    I also have the USB Drive, which I use for the most critical stuff we need, but even then, it can't handle all of it, as there's just a lot of Data we've got. I mean, back a few years ago, I was able to fit everything we needed backed up, on my Server, and the USB HD together. But now, no way.

    A couple TBs of drive space would be required to do a complete back up now. And I'm not even counting my MP3 Collection, or movies. Or games for that matter..... I don't use Pirated software because there isn't really any software out there that I don't already have that I really want for Windows, and for everything else.... Well, most of that is free, so I don't need to.

    It's not that I have a problem with Piracy; I don't really have a real issue with it, as I'm not exactly worried about Microsoft losing a hundred bucks on my own accord, but, with the number of back doors I've seen in pirated copies of software, and, the fact that there isn't any I really want that I don't have as I said, I just don't really do it.

    The games stuff I liked to back up, were my saved games from the DooM Series, Quake Series, and so on. That doesn't take up much space really, and, now that I finally found a GOOD Cross Platform Archiving and Compression tool, I finally started using it.

    I didn't like using WinZip, because it kinda sucks other than the fact that every OS on the planet seems to be able to use .zip files, but I don't personally think it's all that great in terms of compression VS anything else.

    .7z Archives on the other hand, are VERY nice. And for Windows, you can use TugZIP and PeaZIP, and, on Linux, there's a bunch of 7Zip tools, and the same is true for FreeBSD, so, I've been standardizing on it.

    It's not something you'd want for "true back ups" because it won't keep certain things like ownership on files, but it does do wonders for someone who just needs to make sure 400 GBs worth of Data will fit on 250 - 300 GBs of Drive.

    Not sure what you use personally for compression but if you don't already, go get PeaZIP! Not only can it handle like 10 or 15 different Archive formats, but when you go to Compress something... WOW is it nice...

    Just last night, I was putting some Data on my new USB Thumb Drive, which I LOVE because it's Neon Blue, but, I managed to make something around 8 GBs into 1 GB. That's awesome I think.

    The stuff that's more Important to me, would be things like my Wedding Pictures, my Wedding Video, the saved Messages from back when I first met my Wife.... I have like every Conversation we ever had saved. I think it's cool.

    There's other pictures too obviously but My Wedding Photos are important. So, they get backed up first, along with the video of the whole thing. Then I'll back up things like family Photos and whatever else I need, and then of course I have a bunch of video I shot that I want to save, and then, of course, my Configuration files for some things.

    I have a few things like "Muttrc.Master" and "Muttrc.Slackware" and so on. 9 MBs of Text is a lot of configuration, and I don't want to have to again.

    Also of importance are files we need for other stuff that's REALLY important. I don't mean like Receipts either; I mean like files from Immigration. That's WAY to important to risk.

  6. #46
    Junior Member goreswife's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jan 2009
    Location
    Michigan
    Posts
    12
    Yeah now I have things set up, so that data and programs are installed on a separate partition and the OS is on its own partition, that way, if I, heaven forbid, get stuck with another crash like that, the data loss will be very minimal.

    I also backup every app I install. That way, in case of a crash, it'll be much easier to re-install everything. I've always been bad at making backups. The one thing I've been thinking of doing is using my old machine as a backup rig.

    I think that the main reason why I handed over that hdd was that well I was 18 or so at the time and I was lazy. That semester was pretty busy, I had class on average from 8 in the morning until 6:30 at night, then I'd get home and have a ton of homework to do, so when the guy basically asked for it, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

    It's not just the mp3s that I lost, I lost a lot of other stuff, but that was the biggest chunk, downloading that much stuff on dialup took forever, it wasn't so much the music itself as the time spent that pissed me off. Though I did have quite a few things that were nearly impossible to find again. I remember having some french street punk from the 80's on there, you just cannot buy that stuff, I saw 1 song on a compilation on vinyl once in a store, they wanted 40 bucks for the record, and it was used and in a pretty bad shape.

    I also had a ton of pictures on there, school work, and a bunch of other stuff. The school work as mostly essays I'd written for classes and a LOT of coding. The sad thing is, that new machine had a zip drive, I'd decided to get one for backups, since I really didn't have anywhere to backup all that data to before.

    So there you have it, I was once young and stupid :>

    Then again, this was before I worked tech support, back when I still had some faith in people and expected people not to be stupid. I figured they could throw in that drive without screwing up, since I'd asked them to put it in there and do nothing to it, not touch it, not mess with it and I'd made sure they knew that it was fine that they couldn't read it and leave it as is. It's embarrassing to admit that I was once that naive, but it's crap like that that teaches you not to be so naive.
    Last edited by goreswife; September 13th, 2011 at 10:18 PM.
    Out there in the darkness, they're coming after me, a thousand stalking zombies, they want my brains to feed.

  7. #47
    Senior Member nihil's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jul 2003
    Location
    United Kingdom: Bridlington
    Posts
    17,188
    Hi, the guys in that store were certainly feeding you some BS. Your mention of the "deadly reset button" has sort of given me an idea as to what might have happened.

    When you put a new drive into a Windows box and boot it usually pops up a screen inviting you to format it.

    I am guessing that the OS you were using gave them a general formatting option with the default selection being the existing drive, not the new one.

    Being used to Windows they didn't read the screen and just hit enter...............

    Being a Windows outfit they wouldn't know how to do a non-Windows file recovery either?

    For real "mission impossible" situations I have been using this for years:

    http://www.roadkil.net/program.php?ProgramID=29

    Windows 9x~7 & Linux 32/64bit. It doesn't matter what the target drive is, only that it is readable/spins. It works on damaged drives that other recovery tools can't handle, and will do a partial file recovery if it is damaged.

    You can also use it for regular backups and embed it in scripts.
    Last edited by nihil; September 14th, 2011 at 11:03 AM.

Similar Threads

  1. suse is crap on finding cdrom
    By rajunpl in forum Operating Systems
    Replies: 43
    Last Post: July 1st, 2004, 07:30 AM
  2. The history of the Mac line of Operating systems
    By gore in forum Operating Systems
    Replies: 3
    Last Post: March 7th, 2004, 08:02 AM
  3. System running like Kucinich--slow.
    By Linebacker54 in forum Newbie Security Questions
    Replies: 14
    Last Post: February 18th, 2004, 02:12 PM
  4. Opinions on running your computer 24/7 and sideways
    By CyberSpyder in forum AntiOnline's General Chit Chat
    Replies: 6
    Last Post: April 16th, 2003, 04:11 PM
  5. Win2k running on XBox under Linux :)
    By powertoad5000 in forum General Computer Discussions
    Replies: 1
    Last Post: October 1st, 2002, 04:08 PM

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •