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Upgrading the Dell out of it

Posted by Photonstopper on August 27, 2009
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Dell OptiPlex GX620
Dell OptiPlex GX620

I upgraded my PC last night. The Dell OptiPlex GX620 now sports 3 gigabytes (GB) of memory and a second hard drive that has {gasp!} 325* GB of storage space. The C: (boot) drive remains in place with its 80 GB. I could almost hear my PC sigh with relief as it adjusted to the roominess.

Disk space was running short. Just before the upgrade there was only 21 percent free space on that single hard drive. That's getting to the point where crowding is felt.

Fortunately all seems to have gone well. I'm not certain the internal frame was intended for two hard drives but I was able to mount, securely enough, the new Western Digital HDD into the system. There were available SATA data and power hookups. The drive was not, however, visible to Windows XP when I started the system. I reopened the case, checked all connections, and then it occurred to me that there might be something the matter in BIOS. It turns out I actually had to enable the second drive in BIOS. Once that was done, everybody was happy. I toddled off to bed leaving the system formatting the new disk, something that took probably a couple of hours.

The whole thing was necessitated by digital photography. The new DSLR adds about 16 megabytes (MB) per RAW image I shoot, and I'm trying to switch to shooting only RAW. Even with reliable online backup from Mozy, I worry about loss of my burgeoning image collection. Though I haven't looked at them in years, I don't worry about the drawer of photographic negatives I generated in my time as a professional photographer. I'll also be moving files around on the PC in preparation for a "clean" install of Windows 7 this fall. Having your data on a physically separate hard drive is a good thing when you're planning on wiping out everything else!

Hmmm…. I wonder how many terabytes of data those negatives represent!

* I'm not a big fan of hyper-sized hard drives as I believe they are at greater risk for problems. The new drive was actually the lowest-capacity desktop model I could find on the shelf at Best Buy! Terabyte and half-terabyte models were the most common.

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Greetings: you’ve got no mail!

Posted by Photonstopper on May 1, 2008
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Dell PowerEdge 2950
Dell PowerEdge 2950

I came in to find the email server was down. The system power was "off" so naturally I tried to turn it back on. No-go! Power would come on, then go off. Working by phone with a Dell technician, he concluded that the system processor or main board had failed. It's the machine I did a simple backup on last night. It was fine when I used it at 12:20 AM from home as a test. Apparently it was just "its time" and the system went down. So, at the support person's suggestion, I upgraded our support service from next-day to 4-hour turnaround and Dell's dispatching parts and an on-site tech to install them later today. I don't know what time they'll arrive but I'll have to stay til the bitter end. Nice way to start the day… especially before a planned trip out of town on what was supposed to be a pleasant astronomy workshop weekend! On the bright side, some businesses have declared No-Email Days on certain days of the week or month. It's supposed to force employees to make personal contacts through face-to-face or phone conversations instead of via electronic memos. We get to do that today at no extra charge! Surprising, though, how much we really need email now to get our work done.

UPDATE: It turns out there was a misunderstanding down at Dell… I had purchased (for several hundred dollars) an upgrade of service level from next-day to four-hour turnaround with the understanding it would help our immediate situation. Dell wasn't going to put it into effect for about 48 hours but I didn't know that! When nobody called me after three hours, I called Dell Support and was disappointed to learn what was wrong. The Support Technician worked hard and ironed out the issues. Things moved really fast after we got the service grade straightened out. Within a couple of more hours the prescribed replacement parts arrived and five minutes before their promised earliest time. The technician arrived about a half-hour later. By about 6:10 the Mail Server was back up and doing its mail serving thing. At 6:30, only an hour and a half late, I left for home. Our spam filter system had been saving up mail that it couldn't deliver all day and, over about an hour, delivered all of those messages. Apparently the Mail Server failed between 12:20 and about 4:00 AM. Whew! What a day.

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