Setting up my mom's new computer

Remember when The Thirsty Wolf's house unfortunately burned down? Remember this computer that originated from that? Well, I decided not to make it my gaming rig.

Coincidentally, my mom's computer has been going downhill for a time now. It's very old. Microtel is the brand, and I think it was refurbished. It's 'new' enough to be XP Home, but just barely. It's still a good computer.


I do know that it's old enough to not have USB 2.0. I've been meaning to get it set up for my mom for a while, but today was the day, as my brain hatched a brilliant plan. That and she has 500 Mb of space left. Being rushed is the mother of inv...genuity.

Problem is, and always was, that my mom's computer doesn't have high-speed data transfer. Standard transfer speed (IEEE 1394, USB 2.0) is 400+ Mbps. She has USB 1.0 or 1.1, which works at 12 Mbps, which is not 400+ Mbps.


The plan: slave a secondary drive within her computer, the only way to achieve reasonable speeds. I would take an old HD and put it in the Vista PC, heretoforethento known as Lyon. Lyon would ceaselessly erase that HD, then I would put the formatted HD into mom's computer, and copy everything onto that, then install it back into Lyon and my mom would be able to access everything and move it over as needed. God would send his angels to me for advice and counsel. Glory.


It went along perfectly. I could almost hear the flap of angel's wings! I formatted the hard drive, then installed it in my mom's computer...then it went downhill. 'Hard drive no worky' was the response. I thought quick to some words of wisdom Mr. dataDyne had spoken. The world turned all wavy as the scene came into focus.

Kev, when I have USB 1.0, it says 'will not work at high speed but will still work.' Use the force!


So I decided to try using my external hard drive. I've tried before and failed. It says, "This won't work." For some reason, this time it said "This will work slowly." But it'll still work! Y'know, I think that guy is a witch. Anyways, now it's transferring at a low speed. In two hours it has transferred 4 GB. There's a total of 37 GB that needs to be transferred.



It's actually quite a fast transfer when dealing with large files, but the small ones jam it up. And there's something like 900,000,000 small files...nevertheless, I expect it to balance out. In the meantime, it needs some memory, and it needs it bad. With 512 Mb of RAM, it's slower than my mom's old desktop. Darn Vista.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got some business to attend to. It includes drinking a deadly duo of fresh vegetable/fruit juice and coffee. And then maybe eating that last slice of pecan pie. See you tomorrow morning.

(You know, I'm unsure of why I didn't just put my mom's hard drive into the other computer...I must be stupidly overcautious. Uhh...I'm going to...uh...go...now.)