Changing Computers (Part 10)
By: Mr JM
One of the gotcha’s with computers, or I guess with any task really, is finding out part way through a job that you don’t have all the parts.
When I first started with computers, my first machine was an IBM XT, 8086 chip, two five and a quarter inch floppy drives, (making me the envy of those with only one – there was a phrase used in the early days, the Floppy Shuffle, brought about because the computer would want your program disk to actually do anything but you’d have to take it out and insert your data disk for it to have anything to do things on)
The advantage was, changing computers meant picking up your disk box and walking over to the other computer – insert disk and ‘Voila!’ you’re ready to rock and roll. Then came Windows and all the extra little bits and pieces that make up your computing environment.
Add to that the different hardware now available and the task of swapping over needs to be carefully planned. Will my old RAM (memory) fit in the new box? Should I take my video card or bite the bullet and pay for a new one? Should I simply take my old hard disk and transfer it over and if I do, do I make it the system drive in the new machine?
It all takes careful planning or at least some forethought.
So there I was, new machine built with basic software on it, ready (I thought) to move it into place and start the lengthy process of customizing it back to what I wanted. I went to the local computer swap meet and picked up a new 500GB hard disk for $80 to take all my data and figured to install it while the new PC was easy to get to.
One problem… no SATA power cable for it. I had made sure I had a SATA data cable (quite different from the older cables) but hadn’t checked closely enough to notice there wasn’t a spare SATA power cable in there. The computer power supply comes with multiple connectors but it isn’t specific to the other hardware. The current SATA drive was powered by an adapter on the older PATA connector – and there was only one.
It took a couple of days before my work took me past a computer shop and I could call in and get another one.
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