Is our museum still in trouble?

Well, beyond my speeling of coures. I read the link provided by Txwest. Frankly, it all goes way over my head. Is the museum back on track? What else if anything is needed?
I have a program called GoBack the rescues me weekly from disaster. I also have Norton...but I find it`s the GoBack that when all else fails keeps my laptop zooming along at it`s maximum snail pace.

What can we do to help...in stupid talk please so I can understand.

The quick version is:

Craig, the guy who does the LED Museum site, has an old and very unreliable PC, which has caused him considerable trouble. This is making it difficult for him to do the stuff we all like to see on his site. (Note that this is not the actual computer hosting the LED Museum website itself - it is the computer he needs at home to update web pages, write those reviews, do email, etc etc)

So various CPFers have come to the conclusion that the simplest and best solution is to get together and buy him a nice new system.

The topic here is where the donations are taking place. Have a read through, and if you can spare something for this, it will be appreciated.

Graham

I have been using "ghost" since 1997...back in beta when it was originally written by a chap in New Zeland. Since then it of course has been sold to Norton etc. It is a tad "techy" but a little time spent RTFM will make it work.

I partition my HDD, and routinely write ghosted images to an area reserved for just that. Every 3 months, I burn a few cd's with a hard backup in case of a total failure/theft etc. Nothing makes my day worse than having data lost. My "core" C: drive is about 4 gig...it compresses to 1.2 gig and loads totally in 17 minutes...and I have a slow machine.

SO,,,,when you load that program that you cannot "goback", etc et. It will do a total bit perfect restore. Now I let my 6 year old play on my machine and do what she wishes. She once drug every file she could find ( hundreds) to my desktop. LOOK WHAT I DID DAD!!

I received the econimic savings award for a university I worked at for the perceived savings to the school for Ghosted inages to faculty and staff. I also got a nice $ bonus for it.

With thousands of restores under my belt, it has never failed once. Cost...$100. I bought mine from a "youbuyityouownit" place in Calif. for 60 bucks.

Well, I really can`t afford the Reactor light right now...but I can damm sure send $10 bucks and do my part to support the musuem I love so much. Hell, I won`t buy the light without the museums reveiw anyway. So the sooner it`s up the sooner I can make my next decision and the happier I am

I do think it would be a good idea to install a GoBack or Ghost type program in the new computer though.

Ken

Ghost was bought out by Symantec and is now offered by itself or as part of Norton system works. You should be able to get it for considerably less then $100. If you have an older version of Ghost like Ghost98, it won't read today's newer bigger drives.

I make a ghost hard drive of my initial PC hardware configuration but I load too many games and crap to back it up that way on a regular basis. Go back is a wonderful program that windows XP licensed a stripped down version to use in it's system restore utility. It has saved my butt on a couple of ocassions. If you have windows XP installed on your system then in my opinion, it's not really necessary to buy the program although it does have a couple of enhanced features that aren't offered in system restore. System restore and Go Back are great if you make software boo-boos but of course if your hard drive crashes due to physical malfunctions you had better have your data backed up thru ghost or other methods.

Now of course another option would be to use a raid controlled configuration where you use the type of raid (I forget what it's called), where data is simultaneously written to two drives so you always have an instant backup. More and more new motherboards are coming out with raid controllers as standard issue. I may fool around with this option on my next upgrade.

I've used Ghost for quite a few years now at work - its almost a standard for deploying new PCs.

You're thinking of RAID 1, also known as mirroring - one drive is like a "mirror image" of the other (not exactly, since the image isn't reversed..) The best way to go, but it means you basically have to buy twice as much hard disk space as you intend to use.
RAID actually stands for "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks"

Graham