Typical HDs from a few years ago were Parallel ATA. since they were the only kind of ATA around, the “P” was silent :). The new thing is Serial ATA, or SATA. So you can’t connect your old 100GB drive in there with a SATA connection.
A combo DVD/CDRW drive is very cheap, I’d recommend buying one and opening up a slot for your 100GB drive, and then ditching the CD burner.
Sorry for all your troubles! This is frustrating, I know.
A friend of mine has been planning to build a computer, and has been proudly showing me his finds on Newegg.com. Based on your suggestion, though, I did some browsing there. Things like this seem pretty convenient. A lot of reviews complain of a high failure rate, though; this one appears to be the most stable of the dongles offered there. Would a card like the ones you showed me be a better option?
Also, I’m not too keen on investing much $$$ for the time being, since I might soon be essentially required to get one for class. Considering the steep requirements for Vista, and that it’s hard to find something small, stripped, and inexpensive for under $1500, I might have to transition to a new rig altogether (the personal computing industry sure has my balls in a vice grip these days). This computer is less than 2 years old anyway, and I had an old HD laying around that I hadn’t used yet because I couldn’t figure out how to get my case open (please don’t let that influence your opinion of my computer skills TOO much ;)). And if I can’t fix this CD burner thing, I could replace it with a 3rd party one in my old rig that worked really well. I’d have just gotten a DVD ROM in this one and used my old burner if I could have, but they didn’t give me any choice. IDE vs SATA isn’t an issue there anyway, since my optical drives on this rig are on its single IDE port.
Sorry I forgot to mention: it’s not 100G, it’s just 80. Big friggin’ deal, right? 
“One” of course being the word for “laptop” in my native language of Idiot. :smack:
Dude, please. I have a one year old AMD Turion 64-bit machine running 1.6Ghz, 512 MB RAM (shipped with 256MB,) 400 FSB (doubled to 800 w/64-bit OS), 40 GB HDD (which I consider criminally tiny, but that’s a whole 'nother story!) currently running WinBloze 64 and I can tell you right now it’d tear up Vista Ultimate, were I ever stupid enough to load that overblown, overpriced, overhyped, bloated, festering pile o’crap onto it. I paid six hundred bucks for the lappie, out the door. I’ve seen basically the same machine, only more memory, slightly faster processor, bigger hard drive and a DVD combo drive (mine’s DVD R, CD RW) for about the same price within the last month from Fry’s. Online Fry’s is Outpost or check ECS which has dirt cheap computers–yup, you don’t get support, but then again you aren’t actually getting support from Dell, no matter what they tell you in the brochures.
If you REALLY MUST HAVE the sideways windows effect, you can strap it on top of XP and have all the look and feel of Vista without the associated bloat–on a machine that’s substantially under the “required” hardware for Vista. I know this, because before the evil-genius SO decided to turn his PC into a Mac clone, he had it running as a Vista clone. He’s weird like that…
You can get the IDE card for $20 and it is what I would choose. It’s $5 more than the adapter you show, and you have the SATA if you want it later. You have to have a cable for the hard drive reguardless of your upgrade choice. You can connect the cd rom to the card also. I believe the cd rom burning problem is because of the lack of temp space on the hard drive.
You can add in another burner if you have the room in the case, whith the IDE card added in.
Depending upon how you surf, Firefox can add up quite a memory footprint by caching pages in each tab. To change this, try these settings depending upon how much memory you want to dedicate to it.
For checking and freeing up Hard drive space, I recommend these three freeware programs:
Since you have really the minimum amount of RAM needed to run XP as a main machine with multiple applications running, I would definitely consider upgrading. I also agree with myglaren in that it you should not have to worry about what Dell thinks of the components you buy/install. Any RAM of the correct specification should work. If you want to play around with your RAM settings, check out Cacheman
I can’t say it has ever worked miracles for me, but it gives you options beyond process explorer, so it at least lets you feel like you are doing something.
I’m sure I’m missing something here but if there is only 1 IDE connector on your motherboard, what is the existing hard drive connected to if you have two optical drives in there.
I am guessing and likely to be proved incorrect that there are two IDE ports on your motherboard with IDE 0 for the hard drive and IDE 1 used for the optical drives.
If so then you just need to buy a replacement IDE ribbon cable with three connectors on it, assuming that the cable to the hard drive only has two (one for the drive and one for the mb port.
It is most unusual to find a board with only one IDE port, even a board with SATA connectors.
It’s odd I wouldn’t get a warning message or some kind of notification to that effect. It just keeps telling me to put a writable CD in the drive.
I’m running avast at the moment, and now I’ve got 4 programs running above 20,000K. It seems like the memory usage is higher in general.
Myglaren, my optical drives are connected to my IDE connector on the same cable, and my current hard drive is connected to one of my two SATA ports.
Earlier today I ran the remove unused program wizard and inadvertently removed MSPaint and MediaPlayer, among other things. I just found this out now. Apparently I was supposed to check the boxes on stuff I was supposed to keep? I know how to get media player back, but goddamnit! How can I get paint and internet reversi and such?
This just keeps getting more and more interesting. :dubious:
Is system restore operating yet? Use it. You did say you still were using it.
I’ve got a number of points to choose from. Is this just going to restore programs, or is it going to undo the file deletions I did too?
Choosing the restore point just prior to where you made the bad decision on what to remove should restore what you want, but some files you didn’t want will be back. You can however go back again and choose “Undo My System Restore” before any more restore points are written.
Article on using system restore.
You can do this if all the removed components you need installed were windows components only. From the control Panel chose the “Add or Remove Programs” utility and click on “Add / Remove Windows Components” 2 down on the left side. You now have access to choose what windows components you wish installed. click on the words “Acessories and Utilities” and then click the details box on the lower right. Click on the words “Acessories” and then the details button. At the bottom of the scroll window you can check “Paint” in the box, and then click “OK”. Do this for all the programs you want restored, and then finish the wizard and let the programs install.
Sorry, had to suck it up and put the computer stuff on the back burner for a while. I ran a system restore last week, though. It fixed the things that got removed without restoring the various unrelated files I had deleted on purpose. I’m also going to get one of those IDE cards at some point.
The system restore also brought back Symantec and removed Avast!, which is good since the latter wasn’t working out for me. My per-program resource usage actually increased when I was using it, and I got impatient trying to figure out how to fine-tune the program settings so that it wasn’t too intrusive.
A friend gave me an installer for an AVG trial that was limited in terms of various firewall settings and such rather than the 30 day limit that got imposed on the version I used to use. I installed that while I had my other trial version still on the computer. I went to install the soon-to-expire trial version, but it took components of the copy my friend gave me with it. Not only does it not work any more, but it also gives me an error message when I try to uninstall it. That said, can anyone recommend a program that will clean up any scraps of uninstalled programs that might have been overlooked?
The CD burner problem still exists, even though I now have 5.97 of 33.5 gigs free. I can see in My Computer that the drive at least recognizes something’s in it, and my system profile doesn’t have that exclamation point next to anything. It’s still able to play music CD’s, so I still think there’s some kind of software conflict. I did download a new version of Winamp last month. Could that be related?
I would like to back up a few gigs worth of stuff before I do a defrag, but for now I’ll have to settle for resorting to my jump drive.
Since you mentioned fragmentation problems this is probably a big suspect right here. Less than 10% hard drive and heavy fragmentation means you have probably got serious speed issues.
Unplug a CD drive, plug in that second drive, offload as much stuff as you can, and defrag.
You may want to consider something like DIRMS if offloading is not an option. It will take many passes but it can and will do partial defrags that MS defrag will not.