Computer help?

That used to be a problem but it isn't anymore. Back in the day, when you turned off your computer, you did so by cutting power at the power supply transformer (if you've looked inside your computer, that's the big metal box near the back that the power cord plugs into.) Since all power to the system was terminated, the motherboard needed a trickle of power to keep the clock running and current. That battery would charge while the computer was on and run while it was off but eventually, like all rechargable batteries, its duty cycle would expire and it would lose the ability to hold a charge.After a while they redefined the specification for motherboards, power supplies, and computer cases to specify that the computer would go "soft-off", that is, the power supply would supply a constant trickle charge to the circuts on the motherboard to run the clock and other components. The other advantage to this was that you could turn your computer off from a software command in Windows (and have it automatically turn on at scheduled times) instead of at a switch on the front panel.So I highly doubt it's a clock battery issue. It's been at least ten years since I heard about a computer where that was an issue.

CD's aren't magnetic, they encode data optically, so they're all but immune to magnetic fields and the like. But they can be ruined by scratches on the data side (the side without the label) so keep them in some kind of sleeve or jewel case.Keep that stuff off your magnetic storage, though - things like hard drives and floppy disks. Old (ATA) and new (SATA) technologies for hard drives to connect to computers. We're pretty sure that, if your computer is as old as you make it out to be, you'll want to ask the guy at the store for their cheapest ATA hard drive. Even on the offchance that your geek friends gifted you with a system that uses SATA hard drives - and those only became common in mid/low-range desktops in about the past 1-2 years - your computer will still have support for the older hard drive technology. They can be. There's a lot of competition among hard drive makers so the prices go up and down, and sometimes the stores offer deep discounts. If wherever you go can't offer you a drive for under $100, go somewhere else.

Ever since I discovered Writely and Google Spreadsheets I don't even install office software anymore. They're universally portable, will export into MS Office formats, and the best part is you don't have to cart even a USB jumpdrive around to make sure you're using the most current version of your files. Plus they support all kinds of nifty collaboration features. That's almost true. But when it comes to building systems, spend the money on decent motherboards and power supplies. Everything else? Find whatever deal you can. But buy a cheap power supply and you wind up buying it over and over again - I had a power supply pop its caps the first time I booted the computer. Now I pay the money for Antec PS's.Buy a cheap motherboard and you'll wind up buying everything else over again - it'll be the last thing you attempt to test, and in the meantime you've bought replacements for nearly every other part. Gamers need good memory, preferably with some heatspreaders. Everybody else can get by with cheap RAM as long as they don't expect to run it at the bus speed it says its rated for.

1) You can't replace your motherboard (unless like, you're replacing a defective model with an exactly identical replacement) without reinstalling Windows. At least, you shouldn't. I've never been able to make it work - Windows will freeze at startup.2) New motherboards have new power requirements, which means they're not entirely compatible with old power supplies. I got burned on that recently when I upgraded my wife's system. Turns out that they went from a 20-pin mobo power header to a 24-pin. Oh, well - needed more power for her new video card, anyway. (World of Warcraft looks pretty sweet on a 7600GT.)Honestly if Faith hasn't reinstalled windows yet, that's exactly what I'd do. Boot up from the Windows CD into Setup, have it erase your old Windows, and reinstall. Go through and reinstall whatever software you use most, although most of it should remain on your disks. And the installer will take all your "My Documents" stuff and save it to a folder you can open later (C:/Documents and Settings/Crashfrog.PROSPERO on my machine, called "Prospero"), but you should backup anyway if at all possible.

It's just the advance of technology. As motherboard bus speeds increase, they stop being able to downclock the RAM bus far enough to use the old RAM. That can be a good technique when you know what you're doing in regards to installing part. Honestly, low-end dells run something like $300. If she's limping along with a 900 mHz Celeron better to simply spring for something a little more modern.

If you decide to pick up a new computer at Best Buy, bring the old one in the car when you go buy it. When you do, tell the Geek Squad guys at the frost that you want them to take your old Zip drive out of your old system and drop it in your new system. I doubt they charge more than 30-40 bucks for the work of minutes.The old drive will work, and it'll be super-easy for someone proficient to drop it in. And consider one of the USB thumb drives that people have been talking about, in addition. Something like this:They come in different sizes, they plug into every modern computer, they're super-small (that one is probably the size of a stick of gum), they're super-cheap and easy to use. You plug it in and it shows up in My Computer like a Zip disk or another hard drive. And I doubt you'll pay more than 20 bucks for one.Or, don't. Folks are just trying to be helpful, but I can understand how it might be confusing. Just to try to summarize, here's what I'd recommend, drawing from what people have said, as a plan of attack:1) Try to reinstall Windows.
2) If you still have the same problems on a fresh install, it's a hardware issue. Buy a new computer for cheap and have them put your Zip drive in it. Even if you bought a Dell online, you could take it in to the Best Buy and they would do that for you. Also consider moving away from Zip disks, as your disks/drive are probably going to go bad sometime in the next couple of years.I used to do tech support, and I helped some truly clueless users, and you're definately not as illiterate as you may think you are. Hopefully that should give you a little confidence about your ability to deal with these computer issues.

She's using XP Home now, so it's not like she's using ancient Office. It'll load; her new computer will probably have XP as well. I don't think Vista is coming out anytime soon.I don't forsee any issues whatsoever with Faith trying to use her current copies of any software on her new computer, unless she's misplaced the CD codes but she doesn't strike me as the kind of person that would allow that to happen. (Unlike me, I guess. My software filing system is a huge box that I toss all that crap in.)

I'm about to geek out so Faith, skip to the bottom if you want.I'm usually an AMD fan wherever possible - they almost always have a considerable performance advantage over Intel machines at the same clock speed. But my wife and I are hardcore gamers, we have specific needs. For her machine I put in an Athlon 64 3200, and I overclock it a little bit in a highly customized case. (I'm hampered, budget-wise, by the fact that we need two gameable computers.)I had to upgrade my computer about a month sooner than I wanted to, and because the new Core 2 Duo (aka "Conroe") chips were imminent, prices were pretty low on Pentium D's. I picked up one of those but screwed myself on the motherboard, which I need to replace. (I didn't do enough research and got stuck with one that will run a Pentium D, but not both cores on it. So essentially I paid too much for a P4.)The things I do push my system to its limits, so if I was buying a pc now instead of two months ago when I did, I wouldn't consider anything but a newer two-core chip like the Core 2 Duo or an Athlon FX dual-core. Those can get pricey right now, though.Out of those two you mentioned, for Faith's low-end needs? I'd go with the first one. She'll benefit more from a low-end dual-core and more RAM than from a fast single-core with less RAM. The fact that the first one only has integrated Intel graphics hardware shouldn't matter; I doubt she's going to be making the step to Vista and she doesn't game. And the capability to burn DVD's will serve her well if she has the need to do backups. (She could probably burn every single ZIP disk she has onto the space of one single-layer DVD.)IMO? I'd recommend for her the Celeron D system. More features, more modern technologies, more stuff that she's going to find useful.

Don't break your arm patting yourself on the back, macboy. Your machine has a BIOS, too - you just aren't allowed to access it. Which means a lot of the sweet features of the Core 2 Duo chips that ship with the new Macs, like unlocked processor clock frequencies? You can't use 'em.Granted, though - PC chipset makers are idiots for not defaulting the BIOS to attempt to boot from CD first. Most BIOS have a boot menu function (usually F8) that serves the same purpose. Don't get me wrong, I'm no PC partisan - there's at least 3 operating systems running in my apartment at any one time - but a lot of the Mac hardware archetecture stresses usability or power consumption/heat production at the expense of performance.

Chipset makers aren't taking ATA off motherboards any time soon. As far as I know it's supported by all the current chipsets (NVIDIA nForce, ATI Crossfire, and the Intel family stuff) and will be for a while because while SATA hard drives are as cheap and profligate as ATA drives, the same is not yet true for SATA optical drives.ATA isn't going anywhere for the time being, and we're well beyond the point where chipset makers can't spare the die space for legacy busses. Now it's true that your average new motherboard may not have the customary two ATA headers, but it'll have one for sure.

For your purposes? No problem that I can see.I understand you to be saying here that you're interested in a new computer with a SATA hard drive. Yes? I don't see you having any problems there - just about all the systems a Best Buy (for instance) will sell will have a SATA hard drive.If you're looking at a SATA hard drive for your current system, from what you've described I'd say there's about an 80% chance that you don't have SATA support. So if you're shopping for a new hard drive for an old system, go with regular ATA (they sometimes call it "PATA" now, it can be confusing). SATA drives won't work for you, probably. But there's no reason not to look for SATA support in a new system that I can think of. You won't notice a difference in the day-to-day operation of your computer except that loading programs and files should be faster. I'm going with SATA for all my new drives.To sum up:1) New computer? No reason not to look for a computer with a SATA hard drive, and they shouldn't be hard to find.2) New drive in an old computer? Stick with ATA (aka "PATA") drives.

It should already be on. Right-click on "My Computer", select "Properties", and right there under "General" it should say something like "Pentium D CPU 2.60 gHz (2)" or something to indicate it's detecting 2 CPU's. (If you have one of the Extreme Edition Pentiums that support both dual-core and hyperthreading, it has two physical cores, each with two virtual cores, and it'll show up as four CPUs.)If you don't see 2 CPUs, you may need to activate dual-core support in your BIOS. I can't tell you how to do that. If you have both cores detected in Windows, the OS should already be passing off jobs to the second core. But you won't see much of a performance gain in any program that isn't already written to take advantage of an extra core.If you really want to put your system to the test you need some kind of benchmarking software.

ATA: Older, slower, not user-friendly. Have to turn off the computer to plug and unplug them. Can't use it outside of the computer. Used for hard drives in basically every PC for the past decade and a half. Drives have to be configured and "addressed" using tiny plastic tabs called "jumpers". (Jumpering drives is deep nerd-fu which is why you've never had to do it.)SATA ("Serial ATA"): Newer, faster. Can plug and unplug the drives while the computer is on ("hotswapping"). Can be used for both internal and external drives. (Oddly, though, SATA for external drives hasn't really caught on yet.) No need to jumper drives or basically do anything except plug them into a SATA port.Honestly we're already made a much bigger deal about it than is necessary. It's just that right now, currently, the PC world is in the middle of a shift from ATA to SATA hardware. It's during those times, when standards change and new technology emerges, you can be caught up in "gotchas" where your replacement part doesn't actually work with your old system. Honestly whether or not you have SATA drives is pretty low on your priorities when you go computer shopping.The most important things to consider are:1) CPU type and speed. Just have the clerk show you the fastest CPUs in your price range. Have an idea of how much you want to spend and they can work within that budget.2) Amount of RAM. One gig - 1024 MB - is the perfect amount. More will cost you without you seeing an immediate benefit, and less will be almost immediately obsolete.3) Optical drives. (CD-ROMS, etc.) Recording DVD's is a must. Even if you don't have a DVD player or think you have any need to burn a DVD, you'll eventually want to, and it's a ridiculously cheap way to get a bunch of data off a computer. One 4.7 gig DVD is as much storage space as almost 50 of your ZIP disks. Cheap DVD's you can only burn once are pennies apiece. DVD's for use in special DVD-Rewritable drives aren't much more expensive.4) Stuff like graphics cards, big flat panel monitors, aren't that important for you I suspect. Even if you were a gamer like me you'd be immediately replacing whatever underpowered graphics card it came with something much more beefy. So whatever the clerk tells you about the graphics you can basically ignore. It's not a factor in your decision. Whether or not you want a new monitor is up to you. The amount of desk space you can save with a flat-panel screen is just amazing, and they're a lot cheaper than they used to be. Easier on the eyes, too, in my opinion. They flicker and whine less. (Am I the only one who can hear when any kind of ray-tube screen is on in the vicinity?)Honestly, your goal should be to go in with a set amount you're ready to spend, and walk out of there with a machine that's more suited to home office use, with a big hard drive and DVD-RW's for data storage, than a high-powered system with powerful graphics support for multimedia farting around and video games. That's how I see it. Let the clerk steer you towards whatever systems he feels are best for those needs within your budget, and then just get whatever system you like best. Shouldn't be a big stressful thing. (I love buying computers and parts.)

Dumb question:Remind me what you use the ZIP disks for? Basic backup? Or you need to copy files between two computers? I think people are suggesting things without being totally clear on what your requirements are in the first place.

I think the thumb drive is going to be your best bet if we're only talking about 300mb of crucial stuff. A 1-gigabyte (1024 mb) thumb drive should be fairly affordable, and I'm sure you'll find uses for them besides file transfer. For instance, my mother-in-law has broadband (internet access that is fast and always on), so as a security measure she keeps her tax information only on a thumb drive and unplugs it when she doesn't need to use it. You can't remotely hack into a drive that isn't plugged in, so her financial information is safe from hackers.You know the situation you're in is fairly common - people who need old files to be on their new computer. Any kind of computer repair or service shop, or basically any computer retailer, will be able to transfer your files for some charge. You might want to simply investigate that possibility. They'll probably charge you $40-60 for doing that, I would think.