After I got back from the gym this morning, I tried to start my Dell Dimension 8200 PC. The word being tried. Of course I checked the power strip, made sure everything was plugged in, blah blah blah.
Finally the after holding the power button in, I was able to boot my PC. Looks like I have some home PC work to do this weekend. If I can’t get it fix, I will purchase a new Dell PC to replace the old 7 year 8200.
UPDATE: April 3, 2009
I was able to complete the backup of my XP HDD to an external USB HDD. Since the connection is USB 1.1 (at a whopping 12Mbit/s) it took all night. I will make a backup of my Ubuntu /home partition, which will take all night again, and I should be good to go incase the PC stops working. If I can find a good sale price for a USB 2.0 PCI card, then maybe I’ll purchase it.
According to wikipedia, USB 3.0 “SuperSpeed” will be out in 2009 or 2010. It would be nice to have, but my PC is old, and I really don’t want to pump too much money into upgrading it.
Drahusz 