For almost the last month my computer has been dead. At first we dagnosed it as a problem with the mother board and we started to look into new computers since the for what it cost for a new mother board was about 75% of the cost of an entire computer.
Further investigation found that the hard drive had failed. We replaced it about two years ago, but apparently now-a-days hard drives are made to last through about 2 years worth of operation and for most of those two years the computer was on continously. Any how, my dad went to circuit city and found a 160gig drive for $120, marked down to $100 with a $50 mail in rebate. He put it in and nothing... the computer originally came loaded with WindowsME (garbage) and we took it off and put on WindsowsXP but the BIOS (I think its called [tells the computer how to work itself]) was designed for ME and doesn't recognize hard drives over something like 130gig because drives that big didn't exist prior to the release of ME. My dad talked to a guy at work who just happened to have a 80gig drive sitting around his office still in the box so my dad made a deal to do a straight up trade and low and behold the new drive immediately worked.
