Pesky Memory | prairiedog71's Blog

   I've found out that my Acer will under no circumstances accept 2-2 Gb RAM Sticks.  I got a matched pair and still they wouldn't work together.  Oh well, so I returned them & got a new external disk that was on sale.  It is a G-Drive by Hitachi & 500 Gb.  So far it works very well.  I can at least take the old IDE drive I've been using externally out of service.
     Turns out that old (2004) IDE drive is in much worse shape than I thought. :(  I use a program called HDSentinel which uses SMART info to determine your drive's health.  Of the 4 IDE's I have, this one rates the worst. :)  So now I have 2 160 Gb in my 2002 Compaq.  The boot drive, a Western Digital is OK, but this Hitachi has had a complete surface wipe, so hopefully the reinitialization will hold it out a while longer.  The original 60 Gb for this system doesn't rate quite as bad, but it does have several weak sectors.  It is weird since in the 90's using IDE's, I rarely had bad drives, but I didn't have drives quite that old since IDE hadn't been around that long yet.   At least my SATA drives are all healthy.  I figure worse case scenario is that I can put one of the older laptop SATA's in this desktop using a PCI SATA controller or a SATA to IDE convertor. 
     In the meantime, I finally have plenty of drive space. :)  Now, I have 320 Gb in my Acer Aspire, and a 500 Gb external mobile drive.  I did find that the external was originally formatted in GPT format (for a MAC), so I had to not only create a new partition, but completely reinitialize the drive in MBR so that my old Compaq could use it as well.