The holidays are over, and you have upgraded finally from that four year old Dell Dimmension 3000 to a newer, shinier, Dell Inspiron 546 in a nice and vibrant magenta color, and you are probably just getting ready to throw out the computer that has been with you through ups and downs and so many power outages. I have a proposition to make: Keep it.
It’s not everyday you find yourself having an extra computer and not knowing what to do with it, so since you have that opportunity you should probably grab it by the horns and make it worthwhile, there is a whole bunch of things you can do, and if you really want you can make it a learning experience and take the computer apart and try to put it back together again. If you don’t want to actually get into all that mess, then maybe do something like a full reformat, those are nice, and maybe then you wont even need that new computer anymore because you will realize that your old one is juts like brand new!
Lot’s of folks ask me what a reformat is, well if you think of it this way it is easy to understand, it’s basically like putting your entire computer into it’s own Recycle Bin, and then emptying the trash. Emptying your entire computer is the ultimate form of spring cleaning, it will make the computer run literally like it did when it was brand new, at least if there were no damages to the internals of the computer. Lot’s of times it is the final solution to a really bad virus but I try to stay far away from this kind of solution because you will be losing all of your pictures and documents and applications that are installed on the computers hard drive.
Sometime’s that data can be restored, just recently I recovered nearly one-thousand photos from a recently reformatted hard drive. Some companies can charge an awful lot for this type of service, but I stuck with my hourly rate and just worked it out as best as I could, the client was extremely happy. He would have lost all of his pictures that he had taken since 2007, and that included weddings, pictures of their new home, babies being born, all sorts of things.
Learning how to reformat a computer is relatively easy, and tutorials for such a thing can be found all over the internet. Microsoft has a guide in their knowledge base on How to partition and format a hard disk by using Windows XP Setup program, and that has all of the steps that you will need to get that done.
After words, you have a blank slate! The computer is a little dated, and you have your new Dell to work on so why not just make this old Dell something a little more useful than a paper weight or a book end? Best bet would be make it an external hard drive that is on your network, it would be the best way to store all of your photos and videos and all sorts of data. This is the type of thing that many companies do instead of having their users documents sit on their own computer, this is to cut down on liability and also increases the chance of data being saved if something bad were to happen, but that’s another story all together.
Making your computer a networked external pseudo-hard drive isn’t all that difficult. Most users can do it rather simply by dragging their networked folder into My Computer, and setting up something called a “Mapped Network Drive” these type of drives are basically a hard drive that is accessible by any computer on the network, and the best to use if you want to put photos and documents and other files on to a different computer in your network. Making a mapped network hard drive is also a very decent form of backing up your data, if you want to format your new computer for whatever reason you can put all of the files you want to save onto this new external hard drive, so then computer geeks like myself wont have to come in and recover all of your lost data!
There are several other things you can do with your old computer, so don’t throw it out just yet! Scavenge the internet, look for that special “tool” that you can use your older computer for, make it a small hobby so you have something to do in your free time, since it is your “old computer” you really don’t need to rush through this process, you have all the time in the world so just relax, have a soda, and find something new in your life, your old computer.
Do you want to learn how to do some other fun things with a computer? If you do let me know and maybe I will give you some ideas on how to get that accomplished!
