New computer
As Gateway was closing all of its retail storefronts, Joan and I went down to visit our local store, and walked out with a $1,000 computer for $600. I've been setting it up, tranferring files email accounts, website management software, and "all" of the websites I manage, just a weeklong project. While I was researching the tech specs on the computer, I saw that while it has an 80Gig IDE UATA-100 installed, it also had SATA drive capabilities built into the motherboard. Since I need to do some video editing, I went online to CompUSA to find a SATA drive, preferable a Seagate, because I've heard great things about their reliability and low noise. I found a great 160Gig SATA-150 drive for $99 after reate. I printed out the page, and got to work on setting up the computer. A few days later, I opened up the computer, but I couldn't find the SATA connector(s), so I visited the Gateway website, and found in their tech support section, actual pictures of each component on the motherboard! Unbelievable! There were the connectors, A LOT smaller than IDE connectors. I should have realized that a serial connector would have only a few pins and not 40-50 pins like a parallel interface. So yesterday I went back to the CompUSA site and now the drive is $170. http://www.compusa.com/products/product ... pfp=SEARCH GRRRRRRRRRRRRR 
Thanks for listening! |
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 Ron you sound like my computer geek hubby. You should have seen all the gadgets he bought and returned when we went from phone to cable connections. When my hubby finished our basement he put cables jacks all over the place and we can't use them for the computer because the wires are out dated and do not keep the signals strong enough for the internet, even with the booster he bought and returned. So he had to go out and purchase a wireless remote even though there is a cable hook up 2 feet away. After we got connected and all worked well we lost our signal again so he thought the remote was bad and went and purchased another one. As it turned out it was the cable companies fault and we just had to registure again. I would have given up long before. My hubby is a computer nerd by trade and is always adding on thing or another to our computer and it does get kind of expensive, I told him maybe he should take up golf so we could save some money By the way I think that is some foriegn language you just posted in, from what planet are you computer geeks from anyway? I guess I should not complain because without you guys I would have to go back to the stone ages and live without my computer, the internet and my spellcheck which as you can tell I really need. Thanks Ron for all that you do  |
I wish I could comment but we are APPLE geeks comfortably running Mac OSX. But I am sorry for your pain...  |
Ok Ron are you sure you are not my brother`s twin? LOL you sound a lot like him. 
Sorry I can`t help you in that direction....I am a complete Zipo on that area |
| Of course you went and looked for the drive at another site ....the price couldn't have went up like that every where? Wow, you passed u a deal...that was only good until the middle of March though. There's some sites that want over $200 for it. Gosh and they only wanted one penney shipping on it too. That was a great deal. Do you really need 160 G's? They have the same thing in a 80 g version cheaper. I will keep looking around for you ... now I am reading my hardware specs..... no I do not have that adapter onboard. Good computer buy. Hopefully you will find another good deal to match. Hang in there.
My big complaint today .. I have 600+ megs of Ram and my system locked up on me saying I din't have enough resources? I had 90% of my hard drive free and not even 3 programs running with the internet ... I usually can open twice as much. I think those tax programs get a little too pushy if you know what I mean. Not enough resources, don't think so! So now I am hunting down what created the conflict and reconfiguring my software, again. Funny about the cable story ... I ran 10/100 cable for my network, hooked up my router modem and printer router...worked out all sorts of bugs ... now my husband wants to go wireless? I keep telling him the cable is faster and more reliable and he keeps checking out wireless modems and cards? He cannot be serious.   |
| I'm going to be sympathetic to your plight Ron although I understand very little of computers...but feel free to vent anytime! |
| Ok, translation for the fur-not-firmware group (let me tell you, that pun would have gone over very big at a Boston Computer Society meeting)
A thingy for my computer that I needed and really wanted was $100, but I waited a couple fo days too long. Now it's $170. 
Thanks for your expressions of sympathy! |
| *LOL* You sound just like my hubby when he explains something to me and how he talks about his clients who he has to idiot proof his programs for. You both sound like those computer geeks on Saturday night live!
He did an I told you so about the wireless last night. My hopefully not to near future son in law and daughter came home from college last night and he needed to download some stuff from school. He was able to use his apple lap top via our remote. It made the whole remote thing worth it in my hubby eyes |
| Ron,
It may be too late but I went on the Seagate website and found it for $126. Does that help? http://seagate.links.channelintelligenc ... 60023AS-RK |
| So I walk into CompUSA and read the flyer on the wall, no great deals on disk drives, so I head over to the disk drive area to see what they have, and son-of-a-gun if tonight isn't the last night of a duplicate of the promo that I missed out on back in early April!
Yay! Now... off to work! |
| CONGRATULATIONS!
I just love happy endings ....
And when will it go online? |
| I am happy to say that I JUST finished burning my first DVD -- and I didn't even create an expensive coaster! I started 7 hours ago, and was interrupted by a couple of hours of thunderstorms.
The project wasn't anything fancy, just a dump of my Niece's graduation ceremony (Believe me, the video didn't warrant any fancy editing). The title of the DVD (which I didn't know was going to show up on screen on the final product) is "Untitled Project". Yay! 
Anyway, the Seagate drive performed like a champ... now all I have to do is get a firewire card for the tower. Alas, I'm out of slots, so I'll have to remove the 802.11g card from the tower, plug in the firewire card, hook up a USB 802.11g interface and then I won't have to dump the video from the camcorder to the laptop to the external drive to the tower. THAT added some time. |
| Ron, if you dont want to remove the cards to get another PCI slot spare, get a Soundblaster Audigy card to replace you current soundcard and you will get 1394 firewire built in on the front
As for your SATA experience, trust me when i say, you aint alone. I build PC's for fun, most of them are ultra high spec gaming machines and CAD units. I had one guy who uses his equipment to do high speed digital editing. He wanted 2 x SATA 300 Gig HDD's run in a 0 RAID array for speed of data transfer. He went out and bought the hardware and turned up to my workshop to have it all built up (he didnt want me to supply the hardware because he thought he could get it cheaper). When i started checking through the components i realized very quickly that he had 2 x SATA HDD's and cables but the motherboard was 133ATA only on a Promise RAID chip. When i explained this to him, he told me that the salesman knew exactly what he wanted and therefore i must be wrong. When i showed him the pinouts and connectors, then showed him my games rig with 4 SATA drives in...he promptly went balistic on the phone to the retail shop he got the components from. Its not only the public who sometimes get it wrong, but the so called experts cock up as well mate. |
| Great suggestion! I didn't think I had a separate sound card.. but my speakers are plugged into something back there. I'll check it out.
The PC doesn't have many slots to begin with, and they were all loaded except for one by all the video stuff in this media center PC. Thanks again for the idea.. I'll be checking it out. |
| Ah, you may have on board sound, check it up in your BIOS settings or just take off the side cover and see if your speakers plug into a PCI card or into the Motherboard I/O. Let me know and i will help you out |
| I hope I can figure it out... but you can bet if I get stuck I'll make a plea for HELP! |
| Well, good news, and bad news.
The bad news is: integrated audio. The good news is: One slot was being used by a modem, which I don't need. Yay! So I won't have to use the USB based 802.11g WiFi that I already own -- I can still use the card I installed. I'll be able to go out and buy a $30 card for firewire access. Any suggestions on brand and/or other features? (Budget is limited) Thanks! |
| Ron, i know this is UK but there loads to choose from. This is what i found form one of my retailers in the UK
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=76675 Other manufacturers include Sweex, Adaptec, belkin, prices range from $10 for the Sweex up to $50 for the more expensive 4-5 port Adaptec. Most of the Mix type give you 2 USB and 1 or 2 Firewire 1398 ports which is a BONUS
Hope this helps mate |
| Well, I have been jumping through hoops with this computer.
I flashed the motherboard and then it wouldn't recognize it's master IDE port. Got that fixed, no thanks to Gateway, who wanted me to ship the computer back to them, rather than they shipping me a bios recovery diskette. This newbie tech support guy and his supervisor have the gall to sit there and chastise me for using the upgrade that they published on their website. "Nobody told you to do that, so you've done "cosmetic damage" to your computer, so you;ll have to ship it back for repair." (I think they meant "customer damage" but who knows. I wasn't arguing semantics with them. They just lost a customer who has bought 6 computers from them. Then I installed the firewire card in the slot vacated by the modem. In the process of leaning the computer to the side to afford myself access for these two issues, I managed to break off the antenna of my wireless card. It is now brute-force-shoved back together, and seems to be holding. Then I went to install my camcorder and accidentally turned it on before I installed the software, so Windows dutifully and automagically installed the wrong device driver for the camera, making it unusable with windows. So after attempting to fix the problem manually, I surrendered, and performed a systenm restore back to two days ago, and was able then to properly install the camera. I think that counts as a plus for Windows error recovery. So now everything is as I want it, and I actually began to capture video to my new Seagate SATA drive! Works great! Now I can't fuigure out how to make a DVD menu in my software. Did I start with a nice, easy project? No! 27 scenes for the menu! I will never learn. |
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