Add your own hard drive

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OK…..the add says Nice fast system, complete , memory and etc. but it say all you have to do is add your own hard drive.

Now, If I take the hard drive out of my current system with Win 98 (compaq 800). and plug it into the new box, is it going to work????

I guess, by work, I mean will it just boot up like the old one as if nothing changed…

???

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I too have done it, probably hundreds of times, at my former place of employment and even here at home. I must admit though that I’ve not tried it since the inception of Win XP. But, if you’re going to plug a Win98 drive into a different hardware box, you should be able to work through it. It would be nice if you also have alternative access to the web, just in case you need to download a driver or so that you didn’t think of.

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Who sells such a system?

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computersurplusoutlet.com

Seems to have some great bargans, but I have not personally ordered from them yet, so I can not report on their service.

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I’d be wary. See

http://www.resellerratings.com/seller1782.html%5B/url%5D.

In general, best prices can be found by searching at http://www.pricegrabber.com/%5B/url%5D, but also always check at places such as http://www.provantage.com/%5B/url%5D. Provantage almost always has the lowest price for the items I tend to buy from among the set of vendors I’m willing to use.

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Thanks Howard,
I am not too far from them, so maybe if I get burned, I can go and thump them on the head….

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From a limited amount of personal experience and a fair amount of reading I can report that Win98 is much more forgiving of this operation than XP. Of course XP will squawk about activation, requiring you to call MS for a new activation code ( the license is for a single computer, so it’s legal, but activation will squawk). Differences in the handling of device drivers and differences in the registry make it not worth the trouble to try and move XP over to a new system without a new clean install. I have done this though with 98 and was quite surprised to find that it corrected itself almost completely. Make sure to check out the device manager to see if there are any yellow flags left over that 98 didn’t catch.

kip

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Close or not, they decided to charge my credit card when I returned a defective (physically broken when I received it) product that was returned. I when up their “food” chain and got the “tough luck” answers from them. I went with the “evidence” to my credit card company and they took the charge off.
I had probably spent two or three thousand $$ with them before this and had only two or three bad products. Each time I was charged something that I disagreed with but swallowed it anyway for the price. I have not done business with them in over a year. Oh, BTW I bought a couple of RAM sticks and when they did not work, I was told they only work with VIA chipset. I checked the fine print on their web site and there it was, I went back and looked at the page I printed the day I bought the RAM and it was not there. They were willing to take the RAM back with the restock charge. I waited until I needed another motherboard and bought two with the VIA chipset, to this day those systems are flaky and I squarely blame the RAM.

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Thanks for the heads up. I guess even if I went there, they would probably thump ME on he head….

Nice to be forewarned…..

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One cannot even get in the door at many onliner vendors.
When one is rated as lowly as they are, even tho by only 83 or so respondents, it’s a sure sign of danger.

Indeed, I wouldn’t even deal with a “surplus” outfit.
Buy only with a credit card and full manufactuer’s warranty from outfits that are rated at least above average.
THere’s plenty of them.

I shop by price, but restrict myself to only certain vendors, and I’ve been very lucky with Provantage.
Only used Newegg once, but would use them again.
Used PC Connection twice, very good but prices tend to be higher, I goy lucky on two items and got lowest price.

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