Usually people only buy a new computer after their old computer gets too slow or crashes. I seem to have done it the other way round. My old eMachines Desktop computer just died about a week ago. It had been playing up for well over a year now. It would just suddenly cutout like the power had gone. After unplugging and re-plugging the AC power cord, it would work again. At first I though it was a power supply problem, but it was just too erratic. More research found some possible hard to fix problems. It wasn’t overheating, as it would sometimes cutout just after I switched it on, but work after that. Sometimes it did this once, sometimes twice. Occasionally I had to wait for half an hour before trying it again. Since I couldn’t trust it I bought cheap Compaq desktop computer on special, and used the eMachines Desktop as a secondary machine. I only used it occasionally, mainly for an important application which I intended to move off the eMachines Desktop.

When it happened, the eMachines Desktop wouldn’t turn on, no matter how many times I tried. I left it for an hour, then a day. Eventually I gave up: it was dead, never to boot up again. Of course the software I meant to move off was still on it.

One of the reasons I had kept the unpredictable machine around for so long was that up until a few weeks ago, it had the largest hard drive of any of my computers; 160GB. That doesn’t sound like much now, with 1 Terabyte hard drives available, but in 2005 when I bought it that was a lot of space.

Now I’m thinking of removing the hard drive and turning it into an external hard drive with a kit like the AcomData 2163 External 3.5 inch Hard Drive Enclosure. That saves me from trying to figure out how to erase the data on the hard drive in a machine which won’t boot.