Why on Earth can't a 10 year old operating system work properly!!!11!!1!

So, after my 300 GB SATA hard drive fire last December, I learned a lot. I got the drive working, but decided it was best to replace it with a new drive.

I bought a pair of Hitachi 1 TB SATA drives from NewEgg. $90 each.

I plugged one of them into a SATA/USB converter and tried to copy some stuff with my T61 laptop. WinXP didn't find the drive. Hmm. Try a MassCool 3.5" external enclosure. WinXP didn't find the drive. Hmmm. Try the other one - same result. the drives spin up, but no obvious head motion happens.

Go to MicroCenter and buy 2 boxed Seagate 1 TB drives. They work in the USB "dock" I have. Ok.

Mess around, mess around. Find that the Hitachi drive does work with a USB dock interface too. Ok, it's temperamental. That's Ok. Copy a bunch of stuff to it.

Take the drive to work, install it in the PC running Win2k. Asus A8V Deluxe motherboard. Win2k doesn't see the drive. Hmmm. Mess around. Install the Seagate 1 TB drive. Win2k doesn't see it either. Win2k says there's something wrong with the on-board Promise 20378 controller that I'm using. Maybe there's a conflict with the add-on Promise FastTrackII card used to run the SATA DVD writer. Look for new drivers. I seem to have the latest. Mess around.

Take all the SATA drives home.

Try to use home desktop running Win2k (Asus A8V Deluxe, DualCore AthlonXP) to copy pictures to 4 GB SD card for digital photo frame. PC locks up briefly because it's confusing it with a previously defined network folder share. Try again. Home network can't find anything on our Windows workgroup. Try other Win2k desktop (WinFast motherboard, Opteron2) that shares monitor and keyboard with KVM switch. It can't see the other PC on the network, nor the laptop, nor the Mac - all in the same workgroup.

Mess around.

G5 PowerMac is only seeing part of our Windows network, too.

Google around about Master Browsers and stuff. Mess around.

Consider unplugging all PCs and throwing them in the trash.

Whine on IWeThey...

Grr....

So, tell me, how stupid would it be for me to either:

1) Buy a $1k PhenomII Quad machine with 8 GB. Install X/K/Ubuntu and use VMWare or VirtualBox to run Windows XP. Get rid of two Win2k machines.

2) Buy PowerMac with 8 GB. Install X/K/Ubuntu and WinXP with VMWare or Parallels. Get rid of two Win2k machines.

3) Install XP on the PCs. Would XP Home work (I have an unused copy already)?

Which would be less painful to set up and keep running over the long term? (We have 3 Macs (G5 PowerMac, G4 PowerBook, black MacBook), 3 PC desktops (2 running 2k, 1 the eternal MythTV project), 3 PC laptops (1 XP, 2 Kubuntu), soon to be joined by the Dell Mini 9.)

Thanks!

Cheers,
Scott.

Who's going to get the economy going if it's not me?

:-)

I'll look at SOSSNT - http://sourceforge.net/projects/sossnt/ but it really shouldn't be necessary to use NFS, should it? SMB seems to generally work well on OS X and Linux.

This is a little worrying, though: http://sourceforge.n...5&forum_id=182291

Thanks.

Cheers,
Scott.