Dead drive :( :( :(

This morning was a bit like yesterday evening. It just seemed to pass without me actually doing anything. I checked my emails and did some vacuuming, and that was about it.

Oh, I did spend some time trying to get Mauser's comp to work, so I could test my Sandisk SSD with it. Sandisk replied to my support request about the drive not working to say try it on another PC, and if that doesn't work, then RMA it. But I couldn't get Mauser's comp to switch on, it seemed like now that had broken too!

And I took the icing off the cake I made the other day (which pulled off some sponge with it). Then I added some more icing sugar and vanilla to it and put it back on the cake. It's nicer now, though I think it could still do with more vanilla.

In the afternoon I processed some pics.

When Billy got in I asked him to look at Mauser's comp, and the problem was that the motherboard power cable is a bit temperamental. I tested the drive on that PC, and it had the same problems. Since I bought it 2nd hand I won't be able to RMA it, and it seems I'll have to shell out for a new HD :(

I was thinking about uploading the RAW files of some of the images I was working on, to allow others to have a play with them. There are a lot of files, so it would be a big upload, and I wouldn't really want it hosted on my own hosting.

I looked at Microsoft OneDrive (previously SkyDrive previously Microsoft Live Drive). However, it seems that there are quite a few restrictions making this service unsuitable for generally sharing files. (And these restrictions are not obvious - you have to search Google to find the information that Microsoft should be telling you up front about the service).

One restriction is that users must have a microsoft account to download files over 25MB. Another restriction is that there is a 'daily sharing limit'. According to a Microsoft employee on that thread:

...newly created accounts still need to build account credibility or reputation to increase daily limit. This is to prevent account abuse and spamming. You need not to worry as your limit will increase through continuous use of the service.

As the reply to that post states, there is no way to check what "crediblity" "reputation" and what transfer limits are in place.

So the service is only of use if you are sharing files with close friends who have a microsoft account and won't be perturbed if they can't download the files because you've reached your hidden sharing limit. Why don't Microsoft just state that instead of making people have to spend time in researching what the sharing restrictions are?

And on the subject of Microsoft, Mauser's comp uses Windows 8. What an abysmal OS! I hadn't used it before, but it seems they changed it to make everything hidden by default, and make it so it takes 10 clicks to do what used to take 1 or 2. Big corporations (and Government organisations) always just seem to make everything as unusable and inefficient as possible, with no logic behind their decisions at all.

Since I need to buy a new SSD, in the evening I looked at what upgrading my motherboard would cost. My computer is pretty old and only SATA2, so in theory a new one could provide quite a good performance improvement.

Of course, since my PC is old, then upgrading the motherboard would also require me to upgrade the RAM and CPU. And, yikes, it gets expensive quickly. I priced it as follows:

16GB DDR4 RAM

£170

X99 mobo

£200

240GB SSD

£75

Intel Core i7-5820K 3.30GHz processor

£300

And that's without even looking at the cost of a decent graphics card (the one I have at the moment is pretty poor). Ideally I'd like 32GB of RAM too. These aren't top spec components or anything, but neither are they the very cheapest. I looked at what gives the most 'bang for the buck', so to speak.

So, sadly I don't think I'll be upgrading my 6+ year old PC at the moment. While prices do come down over time, I can't help thinking that it will be quite a while before those prices get much lower. If the Mobo was £100 and the processor £150, it would still be quite a lot for me, but a more realistic proposition.