General Computer Chat v2.0

[Legendary Silke]

Me? I'm still rocking these now-vintage Core 2 Quad Q8200 and a 9800 GTX+.

On the other hand, I'm still above min-spec territory for PC games... :P

 

[quilzel]

I am not a fan of Western Digital, I've personally had three hard drives go from them before they should have. (less than 2 years old) One of the WD hard drives in a server at school even caught on fire, well melted the board on it. So I am not a fan.

I bought a Seagate Hard drive about 2 years ago, been very happy with it. I use a Corsair SSD for OS, and the formerly mentioned Seagate HDD for media files on my unit.

As for my first flash drive, it was 128 MB. I found it on the city bus when I was 13. XD Used it for quite some time before I eventually lost it. Couldn't tell you what the first one I bought was, I don't remember.

 

[double trouble!]

I am not a fan of Western Digital, I've personally had three hard drives go from them before they should have. (less than 2 years old) One of the WD hard drives in a server at school even caught on fire, well melted the board on it. So I am not a fan.

I bought a Seagate Hard drive about 2 years ago, been very happy with it. I use a Corsair SSD for OS, and the formerly mentioned Seagate HDD for media files on my unit.

As for my first flash drive, it was 128 MB. I found it on the city bus when I was 13. XD Used it for quite some time before I eventually lost it. Couldn't tell you what the first one I bought was, I don't remember.

pfft... that must have been funny to see in action!
From now on, I will only buy WD.

 

[Meganium]

When I was on my 2-month externship in school, one of my duties was HDD data erasure & checking. The majority of the HDDs that I had to threw away/mark as "void" were mostly from Western Digital. A lot of them failed to pass Phase 1 of disk erasure because the software we used detected so many countless errors. Guess now I know they actually are horrible. xD

 

[double trouble!]

I hope my WD external drive won't die any time soon :|

 

[Legendary Silke]

My WD external drive is a 1 TB one that's also really small. storage has come a long way, huh?

 

[Tsutarja]

After consideration, maybe a Seagate drive will work for me.. Like i said, I have had horrible experience with WD (external) and thought their internal drives were better... guess not.

I have a Seagate 1TB external HDD right now and I LOVE IT! Unlike WD, the software isn't mandatory and its much more compact in size than the WD drive I had.

 

[quilzel]

pfft... that must have been funny to see in action!
From now on, I will only buy WD.

I didn't actually see the drive go up in smoke, but I did get to witness the horrid odor burning electronics cause. Lucky a professor walked in the room just as it happened, he quickly pulled the plug on the server and got it put out before it could do any damage to the other components.
https://i.imgur.com/kSBJe.jpg

After consideration, maybe a Seagate drive will work for me.. Like i said, I have had horrible experience with WD (external) and thought their internal drives were better... guess not.

I have had far better luck with their external stuff, but now I am paranoid. I think I will be getting a backup drive for my external WD backup drive. (I will back up the backup lol)

 

[Legendary Silke]

Right now I'm trying to get myself prepared to try out yet another Linux distribution on my desktop.

I have had bad experiences with Ubuntu and Linux Mint, though, so both of them are now out of question.

Now I'm going to have to make do with openSUSE, Fedora and something else that I probably forgot...

(Right now, I have the ISO files for openSUSE)

 

[Archer]

After consideration, maybe a Seagate drive will work for me.. Like i said, I have had horrible experience with WD (external) and thought their internal drives were better... guess not.

I have a Seagate 1TB external HDD right now and I LOVE IT! Unlike WD, the software isn't mandatory and its much more compact in size than the WD drive I had.

95% of the time, external drives are just internal drives in a specialised enclosure. You can format the drives and lose the software. For instance, my current Hitachi 1TB Drives were ripped from 3.5" enclosures. They perform very well. Actually, I'm at a loss as to why they'd put 140MB/s drives under USB2 controllers that cap out at like 30MB/s.

While I'm not a fan of WD Drives, they're still fine. Failure rates are MASSIVELY overestimated; people with problems are much louder than those with none. If anything, my only recommendation with HDDs is to avoid the WD Passport drives, because a lot of them have custom PCBs (they're not SATA drives), which make recovery impossible/difficult if the enclosure dies. Their Elements drives are fine.

I swear, I have so many flash drives floating around I'm not sure what I have anymore.

Right now I'm trying to get myself prepared to try out yet another Linux distribution on my desktop.

I have had bad experiences with Ubuntu and Linux Mint, though, so both of them are now out of question.

Now I'm going to have to make do with openSUSE, Fedora and something else that I probably forgot...

It all depends on what you're looking to change. SUSE is one of the best for KDE, whereas Fedora is bleeding-edge GNOME.

Once you know enough and know exactly what you want, you could look into one of the "roll-your-own" distros, like Arch or Gentoo.

 

[Hybrid Trainer]

I have had bad experiences with Ubuntu and Linux Mint, though, so both of them are now out of question.

I've heard a lot of people say that lately. What is it that's so unappealing about it?

 

[Tsutarja]

Natty Narwhal is the last version of Ubuntu I really liked.. i just dont have a taste for the new UI and at least in 11.04 you had the option to use the more traditional GUI..

Anyways, last night I installed Android ICS (4.0) on one of my two laptops, and so far I'm liking it :D You can access the market too and get apps

 

[Legendary Silke]

I've heard a lot of people say that lately. What is it that's so unappealing about it?

Ubuntu's interface just doesn't go along with me. You know you're in a bit of a bind when your interface just doesn't work. Mixing Windows 7 and OS X is probably one of the worst things that you can do. :P

Also, both of them seems to have nasty performance issues on my systems even after installing updates and drivers. Oh, and have I mentioned that they somehow are crashier than Windows 98 SE back then for some reason?

 

[Archenoth]

I can understand Ubuntu with their "Unity" interface... But Linux Mint..?

I suppose it is subjective, but I think that distro is awesome! Did you, perhaps try it when it was just a clone of Ubuntu?

And the crashing surprises me... I am not going to say that this system that I am currently running (Ubuntu 10.04) hasn't crashed, but it was my own fault when it did. It has kernel module protection so it shouldn't just crash spontaneously unless there is something horribly wrong with the installation. Windows 95 and 98 crashed a lot, not because the OS did something wrong, but because the third party drivers that were usually installed on the system were poorly coded, and when they would crash, since Windows had no real protection, you would get the rather infamous Blue screen of death.

By the way, if you need any help with Linux, feel free to ask me. :)

 

[Hybrid Trainer]

I'm really surprised that you've been having driver issues .-. Linux has always been the go to OS that I use when my machine isn't having it with any drivers on windows. My brothers laptop is a prime example, windows 7 just didn't want to use any of the networking drivers but I slapped ubuntu on there and it works like a charm now.
And I've been using ubuntu for a while now and I don't think it's ever crashed on me :x

 

[Legendary Silke]

I think it must be some sort of rare hardware combination that I have that's causing problems with these Linux distributions.

openSUSE seems to be out for me, too. Again, stability problems... during install. Strange...

I'd have a computer that works 95% of the time, so seems like my choices are getting smaller and smaller with each try.

 

[Hybrid Trainer]

Have you tried one of the extremely lightweight distributions like damn small Linux or puppy Linux? I doubt they won't work they have a 99.9% chance of working.

 

[Meganium]

I still use 11.04. 11.10 brought me so many bugs that I never bothered using it until the whole thing gets fixed. Drivers and other stuff worked perfectly on 11.04. :/

I still use the traditional GUI in 11.04, just so I won't be bothered with the new Unity. Best option evar. <3

 

[Legendary Silke]

Seems like I'd like to try out one of these lightweight distros, or I might settle for a live CD/DVD as a backup plan.

 

[Archenoth]

If you want lightweight... What about Tiny Core?

It's the most minimalistic functional GUI desktop you will ever find.

Also

Ubuntu's interface just doesn't go along with me. You know you're in a bit of a bind when your interface just doesn't work. Mixing Windows 7 and OS X is probably one of the worst things that you can do. :P

GNOME 2 was made before OSX or Windows 7. :V
That is what it was based off of. And you can make GNOME look like almost anything. No need to keep the default if you dislike it. :P

And Linux Mint used to be pretty much GNOME 2 Ubuntu with a new Mint Menu, not anymore.

Recently, Ubuntu changed to an interface called "Unity"... I personally don't like it, but it is the lesser of the evils when you compare it to Metro and GNOME 3 Shell. Linux Mint on the other hand, recently modified the crap out of GNOME 3 so that it was still the newer API and it acts a lot more like what most Linux users are used to. It is also quite infamous for setting everything up for you. It's interface is much more Windows-like by default than most distributions.

I think it must be some sort of rare hardware combination that I have that's causing problems with these Linux distributions.

openSUSE seems to be out for me, too. Again, stability problems... during install. Strange...

This doesn't surprise me, Red-hat based distributions like Fedora and OpenSUSE tend to work like Red Hat Enterprise Linux beta, an unstable version of it... It is it's testing phase before new releases of RHEL.

If you are going for stability, I would highly recommend a Debian-based distribution unless you are looking to do a lot of stuff from the command line. (And if you don't mind that, go for Slackware or Gentoo..! But be warned, they are brutal. But I love em anyway.)

Any Linux can be made into whatever you make of it... The kernel may have been modified some, but the base system is modular and interchangeable. With enough work, you could convert Arch Linux into Mint, or Fedora into Gentoo. Everything is editable. The main difference between the distributions is it's default settings, default desktop environment, and the package manager. (Debian-based uses dpkg and apt, RHEL-based uses rpm and yum, Arch uses pkgbuild and pacman, etc...)

Just note that Linux is not really for everyone. I like it because I am more efficient at doing things in it, plus it can do cool things that I can't do elsewhere. But if you are forcing yourself to try it and wish to stick to Mac or Windows, then stick with Mac or Windows. :)