By William LaMartin, Editor, Tampa PC Users Group
lamartin@tampabay.rr.com

Thanks to Merle Nicholson, I have very little space to fill this month. From his article, it appears that almost free phone service is here. Thanks also to our ever-reliable secretary, Doug Mullis, for this month’s minutes and to Mike Hodges, our treasurer, for the yearly financial report we are required by our bylaws to put in the newsletter once a year.

For the second time, I have left an old computer sit unused for some time, only to find that when I did boot it, the hard drive had gone bad. This first happened quite a few years ago when I moved on from a Gateway 166 to a newer computer and put the old Gateway in another room and after some time did nothing with it. I thought I had copied everything I might want from it to the new computer but discovered one day that there was this particular very old Visual Basic project that I didn’t have. Unfortunately I received some sort of message indicating that the C drive was bad when I booted it, and no amount of Scandisk, etc. would revive it. It turned out that the D drive was also bad.

Well, it has happened to another one of my older computers — a Compaq 333. I bet you thought no none used such things still. I had only used it for two things in the past four or five years: to keep my contacts in Outlook and my finances in Quicken. It was one of my quirks that I liked to keep those two things on a different computer (to my left in my L-shaped desk setup) from my main computer. Also, this computer had windows Me on it, and that allowed me to use it to answer questions about that operating system when someone occasionally asked.

When I got my recent Merle-built computer, I started using Quicken on it, and several weeks ago I moved all my Outlook data to the new computer, too, and didn’t try to start the old Compaq again until yesterday.

Somehow sitting idle for several weeks seems to have trashed the C drive such that there appears to be nothing in the System32 folder of Windows and nothing will repair the problem. I can boot with a startup disk and view all the drive except that directory. The D drive, where I kept my data, is still good so that I can remove it and put it in another computer if needed. Or I can buy one of those USB drive enclosures and put it in there. But I think I had already copied all of the data to two of my other computers long ago. So it appears to be the old story of use it or lose it. u