Thursday, November 01, 2007

Return to the IT Dark Ages

Last year I bought an LG S1 Express laptop, which at the time was about as top-of-the-line as you could buy in Australia. Of course, shortly after, Intel came out with the Core 2 Duo, which immediately put me a generation behind, but never mind.

For the last few months, I've been bumping against the limits of its 100Gb hard drive, and what with holidays overseas and the opening of the wedding photography season, I decided it was time to upgrade to a bigger hard drive.

I picked up a 250Gb model from MWave, did a full system backup, swapped in the new drive, and restored the backup onto the new drive. So far, so flawless. However, when I started up, I noticed that I was missing some 100Gb of disk space.

Incredible though it may seem to anyone who's into computers, but top-end laptops in 1996 still seem to have 32-bit addressing issues, so the laptop won't recognise more than 137Gb. Just to rub extra salt into the wound, LG have no plans to add 48-bit addressing to the BIOS (and in fact, from the forums, LG just don't do BIOS upgrades - way to provide service, guys).

These laptops are very nice to use and to look at. Just don't buy one if you think you'll ever need to upgrade the hard drive.

1 comment:

Damana Madden said...

Laptop depreciate in a year so how about a new mac?