Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2005 23:01:17 EST From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [LIB] "Click Of Death" - Suggestions For Setting Up My New Drive
In a message dated 2/17/2005 8:29:02 PM Mountain Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: > Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2005 19:28:18 -0600 > From: John Liu <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Subject: "Click Of Death" - Suggestions For Setting Up My New Drive > > Looks like I will need a new hard drive, as my 20GB Fujitsu is making > what I believe is the "click of death" sound. It is a distinctly > audible "clank" and started about a week ago. It used to sound > infrequently, but now comes as often as every several seconds when the > disk is working hard. I've sidelined the L100 until my new 30GB > Fujitsu arrives. > > I am skeptical the old drive will last long enough for me to clone it > to the new drive, but now that all of you have showed me how to install > WinXP on the old drive, I am confident that I can re-install Windows on > the new drive. Hubris? We'll see. > > My question is what I should do differently and better when I set up > the new drive. > > First, should I go to Windows 2000? I hear it is as stable as WinXP > while using fewer resources. However, I don't know how much fewer; I > was already running WinXP with all but a handful of services disabled. > I worry that Microsoft might not be patching Win2K very diligently, and > that I will have more driver/compatibility problems with > peripherals/software. I also worry that Win2K won't see the Libretto's > hardware, or won't see the larger hard drive; WinXP didn't need a > single Toshiba driver, hibernated perfectly, and saw the whole 20GB > drive without drive overlay software. Finally, as you know I am far > from being a PC guru, and I sometimes find the wizards etc built into > WinXP to be handy. Do you guys have any suggestions? My L100 is running W2K/SP3 very nicely. Don't know about XP, but I can't see how it can be *more* stable than W2K on the L100. MS has consistent updates for W2K, and I've run into few (none?) issues related to W2K on the L100. All the L100's drivers are in W2K, all I did was update the BIOS to 8.10 (which you've done already.) I use the W2K hibernation and it has NEVER failed or even hiccupped. I set up the machine as dual-boot with W98 and used EZBIOS overlay. Someday I'll strip that out and go with straight W2K. > > Second, should I partition the drive differently? Last time, I set up > c: in the first 8MB (I don't recall exactly how big, but did write it > down somewhere), then left an unpartitioned space for the hibernation > files, then d: with the remaining 11MB or so. This time, I was > thinking about also setting up a small (200MB) e: partition just for > the Windows swap file. Good, bad, or pointless idea? > > Any other things I should do? > A separate partition for the W2K pagefile is a very good idea. I had trouble initially with my Compuserve browser software becoming corrupted after just a short while, then I set up the separate pagefile partition and the problem vanished. If you do this, set up 2 pagefiles: a small one (8MB maybe) on the W2K partition and then a larger one (~100Mb if you have 64MB RAM) on the pagefile partition - this keeps W2K from generating error messages. The separated pagefile reduces fragmentation on the W2K partition significantly. There are a number of W2K "Services" which may be set to Manula or Disabled to lighten the load on the scant RAM. Try Googling for these. If I can find the site I used, I'll post it. Also, check out Xin's tips for increasing the free RAM here: http://www.fixup.net/talk/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=367 Note that the values in the instruction for resetting the IoPageLockLimit are wrong, I think off by an order of magnitude. Play around with that until you maximize the free RAM. Xin claims his L100 uses only 50MB of 64MB when no programs are running; by reducing Services and using his tips, my L100 is using as little as 40MB! While this is helpful, I'm still contemplating overclocking, as W2K is just not zippy - but it's so well-behaved. Lee
