Monday 3 December 2007

Mac Vs PC - decided


I took what i thought was path of least resistance!
I specced up a Mac - £4000. Gulp.Then i looked at the hassle of moving apps - such as Photoshop - from the PC to the Mac (a paid platform upgrade) and then the hassle of all the other bits and pieces.
In the end I bought a 250GB extra drive for the existing PC for £112 to go with the 80Gb one already resident in chez PC!
I have forgotten what a pain putting extra bits of hw into an existing chassis can be:
- remove existing drive
- remove rails on side of new drive
- mount new drive into internal pc chassis
- make sure the jumper settings are right
-get ribbon cable right sequence (grey before black apparently)
- mount drives in chassis properly and remover to put all the other bits back you had to take off to get to the drives in the first place.
- update BIOS to look for SLAVE drive
- get windows xp to recognise new drive (using disk manager - which is difficult to find!)
- format drive to be NTFS (took over an 1hr)
- take backup
- move data between drives
And here's me thinking it would be a 10-15 min job!

3 comments:

J said...

Don't blame you! I looked at the same sort of analysis and came to the same sort of conclusion! Ended up buying a used PC from work and throwing into it a 500Mb drive. Like you, I also discovered that this machine didn't support plug-in drives so it was back to the old tech rep skills and figuring out how to do it manually! Quite satisfying to get this working - makes you feel all technical again!

J said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
I said...

It was quite good fun! If my software career goes tits up maybe a move back to hardware is in order :)