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Not a fan of Windows
By Wolfie | January 11, 2008
Well, not Windows 98 anyway. That’s the system we’re still using at work, for various reasons - one of the biggest of which is that our current processes won’t move easily to another version of the OS; we’ve been investigating the various alternatives available to us as replacements but so far none of them have really met our criteria. So, we are stuck with 98 at the moment.
Most of the time it’s OK. When you get used to the buggy way that it operates (which I seem to remember takes about a day), you don’t really notice how unproductive it can be until you try to do something new. Which is what I tried to do today. Our back up system needed to be updated, so we figured we’d get a couple of portable hard drives - easy to transfer files to for a back-up, easy to take off site, useful for moving files around generally. Ordered a couple of Western Digital 160GB Passport drives from Amazon at a great price. All set.
Except between when we ordered them and when they arrived, the OS requirements seem to have changed. The Amazon page no longer states that they are compatible with 98, nor does any of the packaging. Not good, but maybe there’s a 98 driver available from the Western Digital site? No; not for this model - only the one before it. Well, let’s plug it in anyway and see what happens. Nothing.
So searching ensued to see if there was a generic USB hard drive driver out there, and there was. Great. Downloaded it, followed the instructions, plugged in the drive. Yay! Recognized the drive (even down to make and model) and treated it just like another hard drive. Brilliant.
Two hours later, after several lock-ups, sudden re-starts and just general-not-doing-what-it-should-ness, I gave up and came home. Throughout the whole process, I got 1.45GB of files transferred in a total time of about 30 minutes. Not brilliantly speedy, (about 0.8MB per second) but not too bad for USB 1.1 and fairly low spec hardware. But I had 9.02GB that I needed to transfer, and for some reason it just didn’t want to know.
I brought the drive home with me and plugged it into my iMac. It was immediately recognised by OS X and I transferred that 1.45GB of files from the Passport in 80 seconds. In the Windows partition (which runs XP) it took slightly longer - 90 seconds. From OS X I even transferred all of my iTunes library (about 18GB) in just under 24 minutes.
So the drive works, that much is clear. I wouldn’t expect USB 1.1 to transfer the files anywhere near as quickly as USB 2.0, but it would be nice if I could get the drive to work consistently without freezing or re-starting my machine all the time. Does anyone out there have any advice they can offer me? Is there a WD 98 driver for the black Passport drives? Are there any other generic drivers out there (the one I used was from a site called technical-assistance) that are nice and stable?
Or alternatively, does anyone feel like writing me a CRM solution that will do everything I need it to do, but which won’t cost more than… oh let’s say nothing to start with and negotiate from there!
Disclaimer: All opinions in this blog are either my own or else they’re made up just to get a rise out of you and make you angry. Either way, they’re probably not very well thought out or expressed so do yourself a favour and don’t take the world so seriously.
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Tags: Windows, Western Digital, USB
Categories: Technology |
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Subscribe by: Email or RSS :: Read more Howling at The Wolf's Howl @ BlogSpot :: Copyright 2008. All rights reserved. No reproduction without prior permission. :: Disclaimer: All opinions in this blog are either my own or completely made up; you decide.
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12:57 am :: January 17th, 2008