Problem: Windows XP Media Player computer from 2006 having trouble hanging at boot up. Error message from backup software that temporary backup files 'unable to be written over 2 hours'. After some investigation, determined that the computer worked normally without the USB connection to the external hard drive connected. Conclusion: Although the external drive USB enclosure still seemed to function (loads and unloads with plug in and out), the external drive itself has failed. When the computer tries to boot with the defective drive connected it hangs trying to talk to that device. The computer itself is surprisingly powerful for its age with 2 x 250GB setup with hardware RAID .. the external drive was purchased with the computer .. 13 real years ago (which is about 117 in computer years old).
Background: 70+ year old client is working on a family history book with 1000's of pictures scanned, old correspondence, cards and letters. Microsoft Office 2000 installed and working. She has scanned many documents and saved them as JPGs but multipage documents were saved as PDFs (with internal JPGs). Her first question: Do I need to upgrade computer and software? Her second question: What is best way to save these documents so that they can be incorporated into her history book? We discussed her comfort level with learning a new operating system (eg Win8) and a new word processor (ie Word2013) and how different they will seem at first and some of the costs (time and money) involved.
Solution: (1) Recommended replacement of external hard drive unit and retention of existing system until project is complete. Although often a new computer system is cost effective as prices plummet and processing power soar over time, her computer system was purchased with higher end specifications and is not noticeably slow yet. Mid project is not a great time to learn a new computer operating system and the requisite software upgrades. (2) I installed Picasa for her a while back and this program has aided her in organizing her extensive scanned photo collections. Noted that PDF versions of scanned documents were more difficult to manipulate into her project. She wants to word process them into her document. Neither Word nor Picasa handle PDF documents well. An extra step will be involved in extracting the images in the PDF containers so that they can be used in the word processing program. One way to do this is screen capture using Print Screen and saving in any graphics program - even just Paint, however, although it works is slow and user intensive. There are utility programs available to do the conversion for you - http://download.cnet.com/Free-PDF-to-JPG/3000-18497_4-75728284.html for example should do the job. Once converted to JPG from PDF then Picasa and Word can be used to organize the images and incorporate them into her document.
Solution: (1) Recommended replacement of external hard drive unit and retention of existing system until project is complete. Although often a new computer system is cost effective as prices plummet and processing power soar over time, her computer system was purchased with higher end specifications and is not noticeably slow yet. Mid project is not a great time to learn a new computer operating system and the requisite software upgrades. (2) I installed Picasa for her a while back and this program has aided her in organizing her extensive scanned photo collections. Noted that PDF versions of scanned documents were more difficult to manipulate into her project. She wants to word process them into her document. Neither Word nor Picasa handle PDF documents well. An extra step will be involved in extracting the images in the PDF containers so that they can be used in the word processing program. One way to do this is screen capture using Print Screen and saving in any graphics program - even just Paint, however, although it works is slow and user intensive. There are utility programs available to do the conversion for you - http://download.cnet.com/Free-PDF-to-JPG/3000-18497_4-75728284.html for example should do the job. Once converted to JPG from PDF then Picasa and Word can be used to organize the images and incorporate them into her document.
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