IT BS thread

Yeah its an interesting and complicated industry. The scheduling side of it I have no insight into, as thats all handled in departments I've never been to. I do know that some of the railroads still use mainframes for this, or at least they did last time I worked for one. I'm on the wayside signal side, which until recently has only been networked if it had to be, and even then it would be local and limited to just a few boxes that needed to talk to each other in a small area. There are backoffice control and indication connections as well, but those are a horse of an entirely different color - most of them were put in decades ago.

But now with PTC being mandated, the flood gates have opened. The locomotives talk to the wayside, the wayside talks to the back office, and each little wayside bungalow is probably networked. There are some growing pains, but I think they'll get it figured out. Using timezones instead of UTC is just a force of habit I think - it always worked before, and going in and changing the entire railroad to a different timezone would be a surprisingly large undertaking.

 

I have an external USB HD. Would swapping out the HD work?

 

Assuming the drive inside the enclosure is the same form factor/size, and bus type (IDE, SATA, etc) that should be fine.

There should be 2-4 screws that hold the external drive enclosure together. Take those out and the cover should come apart, exposing the drive that is inside.

Depending on the enclosure, the drive may be held in to the enclosure with more screws, or it may just slide out. Remove the drive from the enclosure, and compare the connectors on the back of the drive to see if the drive from your old desktop can be plugged in where the existing drive is now.

 

Maybe. Some of the external drives are fully integrated and don't have a separate board to plug the hard drive into. And if its one of the little ones, it might not have enough power to boot up a full 3.5" spinning hard drive.

 

I didn't know that there were enclosures that integrate the drive and USB electronics. I haven't bought any name brand external drives either. If I need one, or want to re-purpose an old drive, I'll buy the components and put it together. Also good point about power. If it doesn't have an external power supply and is designed for a ssd or laptop form factor, plugging in a full size, spinning disk might not work.

 

Yeah I was surprised when I took one apart, it was kind of a letdown. I do the same thing - just buy an SSD and a good enclosure and its off to the races.

 

It's prolly older than you are

 

Windows 7? Nah. Windows 1.0 would be getting closer.

 

I honestly didn't think anyone had to mess with that after PATA drives died off.

 

Old habit. I used to have to strap SCSI drives four dozen at a time.

 

New to me PC came today. Setup and running good for the mostpart. Homegroup pw no worky. Recovery of pw no worky. I have a feeling that the correct pw is on the old fried PC. Gonna tear into it tomorrow and try to swap it into the external HD. Wish me luck.

 

You won't be able to get to the pw just by installing the old HD, unless you saved it in a text file somewhere. Hate to say it my friend, but you just need to move forward with Windows 10. It may take some getting used to, but you'll get there.

 

Spent way too long getting the external HD case apart. Houdini made it. HD inside is WD, HDs from old PC are Seagate. Different connections. On to plan C.
Thanks for the advice, except for the Win10 part. .

 

Is this a login password for Windows? You could Linux to recover it.

 

No, it's a PW for my HomeGroup. Linux? You have far too much faith in my abilities.

 

Win10 is your friend. Let him into your heart.

 

lol I gotta bend over don't I?....again

 

No pounding - it's a sweet caress. Seriously, Win10 will do you some serious favors in the stability and security departments.