Hard drive questions

[vipra]

My 3-year-old laptop has a fatal problem in the motherboard and would cost almost as much to fix as buying a new one, so I just bought a new one and am going to give away the old one. I'm wondering:

---Is there a one-step way I can erase everything I've put on the hard drive of the old one, or do I have to uninstall all the programs individually?

---My old laptop had one 80 GB hard drive, and my new one has two 40 GB drives. What is the advantage of having two drives?

---Now a processor question: the processor on my old laptop was a Pentium 4 with 2.7 GHz, and the new one is an AMD Turion 64 ML-32 with 1.8 GHz. I asked the salesman if the new one would be noticeably slower, and he said that even though the number of GHz is lower, the new one will be faster than the old one because processors have improved. Is that true, or is that just a salesman spewing BS?

Thanks

 

[unorthodoxneon]

>My 3-year-old laptop has a fatal problem in the motherboard
>and would cost almost as much to fix as buying a new one, so
>I just bought a new one and am going to give away the old
>one. I'm wondering:
>
>---Is there a one-step way I can erase everything I've put
>on the hard drive of the old one, or do I have to uninstall
>all the programs individually?

You can erase everything. What i recommend to do is put in a windows disk. I dont remember off hand exactly which prompts to go through. But if you install a new copy of windows it will format the disk. Make sure you do a full format or everything will not be formatted.

>
>---My old laptop had one 80 GB hard drive, and my new one
>has two 40 GB drives. What is the advantage of having two
>drives?

I've never seen a laptop with 2 hard drives before but i havent worked at alot of them yet. The best thing to do with 2 hard drives like in a personal computer is to have one where you install windows. Then on the second hard drive (D: drive) is to install all your programs and any files you want to save on there. Most the time if something happens to your computer it happens to the C: drive so you can reformat your C drive you wont lose your important files that you saved.

>
>---Now a processor question: the processor on my old laptop
>was 2.7 GHz, and the new one is 1.8 GHz. I asked the
>salesman if the new one would be noticeably slower, and he
>said that even though the number of GHz is lower, the new
>one will be faster than the old one because processors have
>improved. Is that true, or is that just a salesman spewing
>BS?

Ok, well there is some issues with this. Intel says the higher the GHZ the better. AMD says else wise. I'm an AMD fan all my computers run this. I have run test against same speced computer and the same GHZ and my AMD computer beat the INTEL computer. AMD has been working on making computers better/faster by not needing as much MHZ and honestly they are doing a very good job at this. Now both processors are starting to run these same types of processors where more GHZ is not always better.

Hope i answered some or even all of your questions. if you still have any questions or comments please let me know.

 

[greg334]

I would ask the question to the sales man why the dual drive. I have had several that had dual drives but they never came out of the box like that. With 80 and 120 Gig drives, it would make more sense to use one drive. Beside that the power consumption will be a lot higher.

The other thing is the speed, as randy said AMD is different from Intel but with that said I would be cautious about the speed. going fomr a 2.8 to a 1.x will give you slower performance.

A bit of advice is simply look at major brands, stay away from cheap off the wall brands when dealing with Laptops. I use an HP and have been really happy with it. I was going to order another dell but they screwed up the financing so HP it is.

 

[LDB]

There are software packages that will wipe the drive clean. You can reformat the drive. The best of the best could still recover some stuff but the unwashed masses would be stymied.

With 2 drives you can either do as suggested and load all programs and data on the second drive while keeping the first drive pure for booting the system or you can set up a mirror drive so you have 2 identical drives. With the first option you don't lose anything if you have to reformat your boot drive. You also have lots of wasted space. With the second option you don't lose anything if one of the two drives crashes or becomes corrupted. Which way is better? Do you have a coin?

You can't go just by processor speed. You have to look at things associated with it like cache size, bus speed etc. as well as how it executes instruction sets. It's possible a 1.8 could outperform a 2.7, at least in certain applications. I doubt you'll see a large difference in either direction.

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[unorthodoxneon]

I agree with LDB the different GHZ sizes wont make much of a difference. Unless you are hardcore about doing something like gaming or trying to figure out something like PIE you may not notice any difference. If you do stuff that reall works your processor hard then you will notice a difference depending on what your doing. The lower GHZ processor may clean up or the Higher one may. There is a lot of benchmarks out there that prove this.

I have a 1.6 GHZ AMD laptop. I know someone that has a base P4 processor that is over 2GHZ and as far as processor test go mine makes him look pretty bad.