Whoohoo

[System~G]

Some of you may be aware of various problems I have been having recently. Life was really getting me down... :(

Anyways things have started to look up again. Work is improving and my wonderful girlfriend (Nicola ) bought me a computer as an early xmas pressie B). It's not new but twice as powerful as my previous lump of electronics with an awesome monitor and Gforce graphics card. I am well chuffed and completely taken by suprise :D

It has a 100Meg zip drive installed... Can anyone tell me more information on these drives and what they actually do as the H/D memory is quite low. How does one use a Zip drive? I have extra Ram from my old PC to boost the H/D memory.

[JappyBeast]

I have a 100meg zip drive also.. its magic for moving big photoshop files to other computers!

The zip drive is just like a really big floppy but it takes a little while to write to it...

Used alot in the graphics industry.

[System~G]

What sort of discs does it use?

Looks like the same physical size as floppy's...

[JappyBeast]

big fat Zip disks!

[Ryan1985]

It uses a zip disc mate, I also have a zip drive, they never really caught on though dunno why really cos its pretty clever!

[System~G]

Why would I want to use one of them in place of my CDR? Other than the amount of space available...

[Ryan1985]

U can re-write to them but apart form that you wouldn't!

[JappyBeast]

Came out way before CD-r's were common place.

[Jimlad]

used to have a zip drive. The discs are quite expensive compared with cdr's, but nice to store some files on quickly if you're gonna re-write to it alot. Can come in handy.

[JappyBeast]

They double up as door stops also.

[System~G]

They double up as door stops also.

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Excellent :D I really need some of those too

[gordypix]

Zips and then their bigger cousins - Jazzs took over from the dying optical and syquest disk drives in the mid 1990s. We used them a lot for graphic images but they are nothing nowadays compared to what's available with CDRWs. Slowly becoming obsolete and will be in a year or so I would imagine.

[supragal]

I've got a zip drive that I used for backups before I got cd-rw's.

make sure oyu get the right format discs for it though!

[Karma Supra]

AS said above... They were pretty much industry standard in the design/graphics/printing world....

These days most people use USB flas drives... 1GB+, works on and usb pc without installing and smaller then a lighter.

Zip drives would be good for storing !Removed!.. I would imagine.

[vmail]

got 2 LS120 disks, where can I get a LS120 drive from?

[alanbradley]

The Ark? :olo:

I have a USB Zip250 drive in the cupboard. When I got it everyone was amazed my how convenient it was, but then it started to take lesst than 40 mins to write a CD-R and they took off instead.

shame, because it's a nice piece of kit!

A

[Jesus]

got 2 LS120 disks, where can I get a LS120 drive from?

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You can buy mine for £20.

Got about 20 disks to go with it!

They're not really that much use nowadays though. For easy file transfer, you can't really beat a USB flash drive (memory stick). The only problem with using ZIP, JAZZ, LS120 to transfer files is that it relys on the destination PC/server to also have the same hardware device attached.

[JappyBeast]

I have a tape deck ZX Spectrum.. how much can I store on that?

[Jesus]

I have a tape deck ZX Spectrum.. how much can I store on that?

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:D :D :D

[Ryan1985]

I have a tape deck ZX Spectrum.. how much can I store on that?

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Now thats wot I'm talkin about, I'm gonna look that out at the weekend and play it!

[System~G]

I have a tape deck ZX Spectrum.. how much can I store on that?

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I had one too with the rubber keys and all

Manic Miner rocked B)

Back to topic:

I don't think I'll be using the Zip drive at all as I have a CD-R and CD-RW discs which suffice for storage and back-up purposes.

BIG downside to this new (2nd hand) PC is the Hard drive is very small (6Gig) and after installing most of my software and 1 game I only have 514Meg of space left :(

Anyone know how to increase this amount? Would compressing the information on the Hard drive be good enough for it? Can one simply and cheaply upgrade the hard drive just by swapping it over?

[Bibbs]

I have a tape deck ZX Spectrum.. how much can I store on that?

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45 mins a side on a C90 ..

[Yarisboy]

this is a 40gig hdd by western digital (very good) at £32 inc vat.

Western Digital Caviar 40Gb 7200rpm IDE Disk Drive

it's simple to install, open up the case, unscrew the old hdd, pop the new one in, attach the power & serial cables, make sure it's set correctly to slave/master.

You will also need to install windows on the new hdd, which isn't difficult - i'll give you step by step instructions if you don't have a local computer geek to help you.

what's the system spec out of interest?

www.ebuyer.com

[System~G]

this is a 40gig hdd by western digital (very good) at £32 inc vat.

Western Digital Caviar 40Gb 7200rpm IDE Disk Drive

it's simple to install, open up the case, unscrew the old hdd, pop the new one in, attach the power & serial cables, make sure it's set correctly to slave/master.

You will also need to install windows on the new hdd, which isn't difficult - i'll give you step by step instructions if you don't have a local computer geek to help you.

what's the system spec out of interest?

www.ebuyer.com

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I formatted my old PC something like 6 times so I am very familiar with installing Windows. I also upgraded memory, video and network cards on the old PC, so I got the basic idea. I just wasn't 100% sure on HDD. Cheers for the info

System Spec from what I can find is:

548MHz PIII Processor

284MB Ram

6.142Gig HD

XP Pro 2002, SP2 OS

GForce 100/200 Graphics card

Yamaha DS1x Native Audio

Realtek RTL8029 PCI Ethernet Adaptor (Not in use)

Floppy Drive

Zip100 Drive

CD-Rom Drive (will be upgraded to my CDR from old machine)

I also have 156K Ram card on my old PC which can be used.

Aztech SoftK56 Modem

Other tiny problem is The PC (being 2nd hand) was supplied without any software discs or the OS discs. I still have Win98SE discs from old PC though... <_<

[Yarisboy]

good stuff m8, win98se will run pretty well on that spec (and i'm sure you have a perfectly ligit key right? cos nobody likes to scrounge microsoft out of a few quid! ;) )

if you wanted to run win xp on your machine you could upgrade it further to AMD Athlon spec on the cheap;

AMD Sempron 2200+ £29

PcChips M848ALU SKT A SIS 748 400 DDR AGPx8 ATA133 6CH Sound/lAN/USB 2.0 £20

Ebuyer 256MB DDR266 PC2100 Extra Value RAM £20

so for the grand total of £70 you could get it running at 1.5ghz, but it will perform more like a traditional 1.83ghz machine.

the 'ghz' rating war is over now, it's all about how many processes a cpu performs per cycle.

Anyway, food for thought :)

(btw, it's cheaper if you've got compatible ram.. will need to be at least DDR 266 though)