Bah. I got paid for my guitar, and one of the things I wanted to do with the cash was get the Compaq desktop diagnosed and repaired. I took it to a local place called ComputerGeeks, which boasts an $89 flat rate for diagnosis and inexpensive labor if parts are required.
The tech opened it up and discovered the capacitors on the motherboard had rounded tops, rather than the flat ones they're supposed to have. So it's fried. (I'm assuming that's correct; that's what I was told.) A new motherboard costs $140 plus shipping to Hawai'i.
That would mean $230 and I'd have the same two-year-old machine that just died, albeit with a new motherboard. A new machine these days seems to run about $350 or so.
I told him to pull the hard drive for me; turned out he had an external HD enclosure he'd sell me for $40 and halve the $89 fee, so I'll have this jury-rigged netbook configuration with an external hard drive plugged in via USB cable. I don't much like it, but I can live with it for a while, particularly for $85.
So, a question: there are a bunch of programs (iTunes and Eudora e-mail are the two biggies) installed on that hard drive; can I run them from the D drive, or do I have to re-install them on the netbook and set the paths for the data to the D drive?
Anybody know?
Posted by Linkmeister at December 11, 2010 12:01 AM | TrackBackYou shouldn't have a problem running them, albeit they will go slower.
Posted by: Rob McMillin at December 10, 2010 08:53 PMThat's kinda what I thought. Slower speed because of the extra USB cable passthrough, but still functional. The tech said it couldn't be done. I didn't feel like arguing, but that didn't make sense to me.
Posted by: Linkmeister at December 10, 2010 09:35 PMSome Windows programs won't run unless they have their assorted registry keys in place, which usually means having to run the installer. Others don't mind.
I'm guessing iTunes won't work right unless you run the installer, while Eudora probably will. But that's just my hunch.
Posted by: Brian at December 11, 2010 07:39 AM