Modeling Again

[Gambler844]

I have following in my computer. I really dont use my computer to do anything but racing. Do you think it will be good enough for modeling?

8.4 BG Ultra dma hdd--------

128mb sdram, pc 100 (100mhz)

AMD K62-350 100MHZ-3D CPU

INTEL i740, 8M AGP VIDEO ADAPTER

Thanks for the help.

[MikeDee]

Gambler

I use my PC for personal use only and most of that is racing. I only have a 4 gig hard drive of which about 2 gig is curently free.

Your drive is twice as big as mine. You can check your available drive space by double clicking on the my computer icon a window will open and in it should be your c drive. Highlight the c drive and then do a right click. Next do a left click on the "properities" item. This will show you how much free disk space you have on your PC.

Over time as you add htr files you will use more and more of this space. If you want to keep these old files eventually you will fill up your drive, it will take an number of years worth od data to do this however.

One thing you should always keep in mind is that hard drives can crash and you can loose everything on the hard drive. So it is a very good idea to keep your old data that you cannot replace on back up media. One way is to get a CD burner and write your self a CD with the data. I am pretty sure you can get a years worth of data on a CD and now you have a excellent back up.

I use a removable disk drive. I have a ORB 2.2Gig removable drive. It uses 2.2 gig disks that are similar to 1.44 meg disks that you put in the A drive. I estimate that I can get 3 years worth of data split over 2 of these disks. I don't keep every track, but I have well over 90% of them. A removable disk may not be as secure as a CD burner because I could can still have a disk failure.

[Bernie]

Mike,

Great ideas about backing up data. I've had 3 hard drives die on me. One way I've found to minimize this possibility is to use a UPS unit. Hard drives are very sensitive to power surges, and UPS units offer the best, affordable surge protection. (Keeping you running for awhile when the power goes out is only a small side benefit to me.)

As for backup devices, I like CD RW units. They let you write over the same CDs with up to 650Mb of data so that you can keep a regular backup routine going. The data from the CDs can also be easily restored to any computer having any kind of CD device, in case your computer ever fails. A nice shareware backup program called Backer 5.0 is available from www.download.com.