Valuedisk

To update the story of the new computer I got my parents and in response to the various ValueDisk queries that Google sends my way, I’d like to note that my fears that the ValueDisk drive that shipped with the $200 computer were proven correct: the drive died within three days. Luckily, it died quickly enough for nothing to have been lost. The problem seemed to be stick-tion of something similar: my brother got the drive to spin up by tapping it.

Yes, the drive is under warranty, but do I really want another 10GB drive of dubious provenance? It still hasn’t been proven to me that these drives aren’t built by Chinese laborers out of parts salvaged from the Western Digital factory. At least it wasn’t salvaged from old notebook computers.

I replaced it with a 40GB Western Digital I picked up from Circuit City. It was about $40 after rebate, and it’s been working fine since.

There may also have been issues with the cheap power supply or perhaps more delicate power requirements of a 1Ghz box compared to the old 486 that was sitting at that spot in the basement, since the computer had cut off a few times without warning. Since the cut-offs coincided with the dehumidifier and sump pump going off simultaneously, they were probably due to brownouts. I picked up a small UPS from Staples to address this. Arguably, the $200 computer has more power protection around it now than my own collection of PCs in my apartment (although I noticed that Circuit City has a 350VA UPS on rebate for about $20; I should pick it up tomorrow).

I haven’t heard any complains, so I assume this is all working.

Lessons? I should have bought a $300 computer, if only to get a better hard drive. Excluding the UPS, the machine has cost about that much, given the replacement drive and the replacement case. Dell refurbs are actually pretty inexpensive. And you get to yell at Dell if things go wrong.

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