I'm glad this post was a wakeup call to some others. Yesterday I spent the day backing all my data on DVD's (I think 14 of them) then I deleted what I didn't need and moved everything to one of my SATA drives, and formatted the other.
I have norton ghost now set up to do a complete backup of my data drive to the backup drive every morning at 3am and iterm backups every 3 hours.
Once I'm done installing programs, I will be doing restore disks with Norton Ghost that has windows, service packs, and all my programs stored so if my primary drive ever fries, I can restore all that from a bootable disk. Plus I'm having ghost make backups of my primary drive onto the storage drive too.
This is the first time I've ever had a set routine on my computer of doing backups. I guess if all 3 drives fried I'd be screwed, but the chances of that happening, hopefully, is small.
I am totally diggin this new operating system too, I never thought a 2.8 AMD Semptron chip would be faster than a pentium 4 3.4 chip, but it is, quite a bit faster. My anti virus program started its complete scan this morning, and before when it was doing that, i'd slow me down so much on everything else, I'd shut it off. I didn't notice any slowdown at all this morning, and I was installing programs, printer drives, checking email, and checking stats all at once while it was going, lol. Also I use ACDSee alot, and when I open a file full of content, it generates the thumbs a lot faster too.
This has been a huge hassle, and cost me a few $$$, but in the long run my data is much safer, and i have a better system.
**************
What fried my system?
It looks like when I hot plugged in the card reader for my camera into the front USB port, I had static which shorted through the piece of SHIT case I had. We think that was the final spark that took down the mother board, which took down the processor, power supply, and my trackball mouse (go figure) but NOT the drives, printers, keyboard, or the video card thankfully. Since I have previously fried a power supply in this computer, he feels the motherboard was falty from the get go, and I tend to agree with him.
He suggesed one of those hubs that you have that plugged into your usb port, then if you hot plug, plug into the hub, a LOT less chance of that happening. Another thing to consider if you are like me and hot plug stuff into your usb drives alot.
