Printer problem

Apreciar

closed wrote: »

Are you replacing because your old pc is still slow?

No, the pc is considerably quicker since all your help a few months ago. However; on a number of occasions I have had the blue screen and shut-down and the hard drive is making strange noises. I am living in dread of the thing just dying on me with all the problems that would ensue. I have Macrium mirrored and back up my main files on an external drive, it's the time and problem of a complete restore that I dread. I am running XPpro and my processor is intel 4 2.6 mg with igb ram. I would hat to lose my 4p printer it is just so reliable and robust.

closed

mirrored?, to where?

If you have a macrium image on an external drive, and a macrium boot cd, then your data is pretty safe, should the internal hard disk fail, always worthwhile copying important data to a dvd too.

The time to restore from a macrium image is probably less than one hour, if you have usb2 ports.

Most (especially branded) PC's tend to last a long long time, apart from the occasional hard disk or psu failure, which cost very little to rectify - check there is no dust clogging up the fans.

If you are going to buy a new pc, then a usb - parallel lead will connect the printer, but you will still need compatible drivers. It might be more prudent to buy a new workhorse printer, they have moved on in terms of resolution and speed and price, but not in terms of chipped/expensive toners.

Apreciar

The drive is mirrored with Macrium to an external drive, I also copy my Documents directory to an external drive. It is the blue screen and close downs that are my main concern. The pc is now ten years old and has been reliable to now. At what point do you consider replacement, at death or when problems start?

closed

Mirrored as in cloned? An image backup and boot CD backup is more useful, unless you plan to crack open a sealed external disk, and find a sata/pata converter if the internal disk fails.

At death, or at a time when technology has moved so far on (windows 9 maybe) that it's impractical to keep - driver support for newer peripherals is the main sticking point. XP machines with usb2 are still perfectly usable imo.

Most blue screens are software related. What does the blue screen say, what type of closedown? Check for dust.

Apreciar

closed wrote: »

Mirrored as in cloned? An image backup and boot CD backup is more useful, unless you plan to crack open a sealed external disk, and find a sata/pata converter if the internal disk fails.

At death, or at a time when technology has moved so far on that it's impractical to keep. XP machines with usb2 are still perfectly usable imo.

Most blue screens are software related.

The mirror is with cd disk, I guess this is a image backup then. The machine a Dell has been no problem and I really don't use it for demanding resources but the data is valuable mainly investment and tax data which if lost would cause MAJOR problems, the tax man is not very forgiving.

closed

dimension towers are pretty robust, as are most optiplexes apart from some of the small form factors with capacitor problems.

Macrium either clones, or backs up, if you are using the backup (which is what I recommend), then that is a disk image backup - ie it will create one backup file on the external drive each time you use it, allowing for multiple backups from different times to be stored on one external hard disk. Make sure you have created the macrium rescue cd, and can boot from it and see the external drive

Copy the tax data, and anything else important directly to dvd using imgburn as well, and then you have 2 copies of everything, in case the external drive and internal drive both fail or get corrupted (viruses etc) at the same time

open the case, check there is no dust blocking up motherboard and psu fans.

Run a disk diagnostic ffrom the dell boot menu if you are concerned about the hard disk

Apreciar

As usual Closed, thanks for your help, will do as you say with the extra backup on cd, of course the data is changing daily so it makes it more difficult. I feel easier regarding the situation so thanks for the reassurance. I cannot remember the blue screen messages, I just close down, leave it a minute and switch back on. I do have a spare laptop newer than the desktop, it is running Vista but I much prefer using a desktop with proper monitor for my work.

closed

DVD is better (holds more and cheaper) if the machine has a dvd writer.

If you have enough disk space on the vista laptop, you could also recreate the whole pc setup inside a virtual machine, giving you extra confidence, and an extra backup

Apreciar

closed wrote: »

DVD is better (holds more and cheaper) if the machine has a dvd writer.

If you have enough disk space on the vista laptop, you could also recreate the whole pc setup inside a virtual machine, giving you extra confidence, and an extra backup[/QUOTE

DVD player but not writer, how do I recreate the pc on the laptop, I have loads of space, hardly ever use it, mainly when travelling.

closed

There are various ways, and various virtual machines to choose from, microsoft, sun, qemu

Try installing microsoft virtual machine on vista

http://lifehacker.com/238071/geek-to-live--run-windows-xp-inside-vista-with-virtual-pc

then what you need to do is get the data and operating system from the xp machine into the vista virtual machine.

If you have enough free space on the external drive, you could use
disk2vhd

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/sysinternals/ee656415.aspx

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/8054/how-to-turn-a-physical-computer-into-a-virtual-machine-with-disk2vhd/

what this does is creates a disk image backup of your xp machine on the external drive, similar to a macrium backup, so you will end up with one vhd file on the usb drive (vhd=virtual hard disk)

then you copy this to the vista laptop

then you point the virtual pc on the vista machine at the vhd, and boot the virtual machine

If it all works, you will be able to run vista, lauch the virtual machine software on vista, and it will recreate exactly your xp machine in a window.

Some of the links above talk about installing windows inside a virtual machine, you don't have to do this, just create the vhd, and tell virtual pc, this is your virtual hard disk that you want to boot, and reset the virtual machine, it should hopefully boot into xp

This explains the procedure.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzKa8AcdrPE