Each PC is shipped with five to ten spare pre-configured hard drives. When one crashes, just pop the next one in.
You're guaranteed to get at least a day or two of use out of your new PC. To get more time after that, please buy the Bonus Pak!-- blainez, Mar 12 2002 Large Array of Stale Technology http://www.dumbentia.com/pdflib/last.pdf(pdf file) one variation on Rods' concept [supercat, Mar 12 2002, last modified Oct 17 2004] Cheap Technology Solutions http://www.dumbentia.com/pdflib/cheap.pdf(pdf file) another variation on Rods' concept [supercat, Mar 12 2002, last modified Oct 17 2004] Why not install a RAID system? Oh yeah, Windows doesn't tolerate RAID systems that well...-- RayfordSteele, Mar 12 2002 I have to agree with RayfordSteele. If you're going to have extra hard drives lying around, you might as well put them to work as a nice semi-redundant RAID system, and enjoy the extra storage and bandwidth they provide. Also, then when one of them crashes, the system can automatically fail-over to the others; the user might not even know a disk crash occurred.
Hmm. Then the next step would be to shrink down the 10 drives, put them into a single box, and make it look like a regular hard drive, so the OS doesn't need to worry about supporting RAID. Then in a few years people will start wanting to use several of these at once in a RAID configuration, and the cycle repeats...-- Jeremi, Mar 12 2002 Some suppliers provide a 'Restore to factory settings' CD, but are you talking about OS crashes or hard-drive failures, or both? If you're using a flaky OS, a new HDD won't help, and if you have a dodgy drive, {insert your favourite OS name here} will still fail.-- angel, Mar 12 2002 I hate those CDs. Some of us never wanted the factory settings in the first place.-- mcscotland, Mar 12 2002 Yahoo! will give you 25Mb of space for free, as will a lot of other people, which gives us <drumroll!> - FARVD - Free Array of Redundant Virtual Drives!-- hippo, Mar 12 2002 ([Rods] - can you post "Redundant Technology Public Sculptures"? - huge mounds of old technology in public places displaying Teletext and those screensavers we don't need to use on our modern screens, all linked together with 14.4k modems and with walk-up terminals for people to write short BASIC programs.)-- hippo, Mar 12 2002 'huge mounds of old technology' - Sounds like my basement.-- angel, Mar 12 2002 $16 on Pricewatch.com for a PC Raid Card.-- dunion, May 26 2004 random, halfbakery