Windows Live

Having suffered errors with my two home PC's running XP for quite a while now, a couple of fatal errors occurred in Christmas week. A hard-drive crashed on one PC, and I think the other has had a motherboard failure.


I had been looking at buying a copy of Windows 7 and spotted a bargain offer online for Windows 7 professional, an unused 'Dell' OEM copy - I took the plunge and bought it and spent the Christmas Holidays building one working PC from the two broken ones...


I have to say I am pretty happy with the resulting set-up, Windows runs a lot more reliably now although I am limited to 4GB with the motherboard that I have, so will be looking at a complete rebuild at some point.. I often can be found nagging about backups, and fortunately pretty much everything was properly backed up and even more fortunately a lot of the XP 32 bit software seems to run OK on Windows 7 64 bit (which is more than I expected).


One thing is missing though... Outlook express used to come as standard on Windows XP, so I had to sign up to Windows Live to get the same kind of email client, but it also came with 'Sky Drive', Movie Maker and 'Family Safety' which I have signed up for. Sky Drive (I imagine) will be pretty similar to DropBox (which I already have) but comes with 7GB of free space which I am sure will come in handy.. I have installed the app on my phone but have yet to actually upload any files.


I now seem to have rather a lot of spare hard-drives, so am thinking (again) about a NAS (network attached storage) system, but I am waiting for a new Wi-Fi router to be sent to me from Virgin Media, so I think I will wait to see what features it offers first. Right now I have two hard-drives in my cobbled-together working PC (160GB and 300GB) I have four back-up drives 160GB, 250GB, and 2 x 400GB and two drives from the other (non-working) PC, 1TB and 500GB. I really want to make the most of these, but am not exactly sure of the best way to go about it - I am thinking maybe a 4-bay NAS for the 2 x 400, the 1TB and the 500GB drives, then keep the other drives as USB drives attached to the NAS. As I say, I am waiting for a new router to arrive any day now, when it arrives, I will be blogging about how I got it and reduced my broadband and phone payments by £10 a month at the same time.