Steve Franklin's Journal: Hard Drives

I just posted to the Fujitsu thread about my success (so far ;-) with hard drives not crashing. My WD 6 gig I transferred from my old computer to my new home built is 4+ years old and I really ought to think about replacing it. The Seagate 18 gig SCSI should be alright for a while, especially with the superior cooling of the four fans and the aluminum case. All that's on the WD is the OS, though. I was going to just transfer it from the old case to the new, but it turned out my new motherboard, a Soyo, wouldn't support Windows 95, and since my Win98 was an upgrade from 95...well, you get the picture--the best laid plans of mice and men and all that.

I was in one of my "gotta buy something new" states this week. Finally settled on a new Intuos2 from Wacom. My old Pen Partner is getting a bit long in the tooth and there's not a lot of working space on it, 4x6. The Intuos2 is 6x8, so I should at least be able to draw something with it. Wacoms really are the ideal input device. No tendon problems at all except the occasional writer's cramp.

I'm just about done scanning a whole slew of old negatives into my computer in connection with my ongoing genealogy project. I had to revert to my old Acer scanner for the medium format negatives. The underexposed ones could be reflective scanned using my new Canon, but the denser ones needed the larger back lighting area of the Acer. What an annoying machine. Between warming up every minute or two and the software losing track of the scanner, it's an absolute nightmare. The results aren't bad, but their XP driver is even worse than their Win95 driver. This is just with the negative setting. Everything else is pretty stable. Lots of similar problems on Usenet but no solutions. No more Acers for me, thank you. Now to burn some CDs and send them off to the relatives for safe keeping. Anybody want pictures of Guantanamo Bay in 1912 or there abouts?