Disklavier

Greetings Frank,

I also have a number of "legacy" applications that need to be run in
XP. I have found what I think is an ideal computer for this and have
about 4 of them. Dell makes a line of computers called Optiplex. They
are very common as POP computers and as little distributed
workstations often networked to a server in places like doctor's
offices. They are made to be simple small and reliable. Most fit the
"SFF" (small form factor) size range. New ones cost quite a bit but
the are regularly available as "refurbished". The really neat thing
about these computers is that you can get the best of older and newer
computers together in one small package for very little money. My most
recent one has a CRRW DVD combo drive, 8 USB 2 ports, PS2 keyboard
connector, 3 GHZ Pentium 4 512 G memory (ubgradable to quite a bit
more) a worthless 40 gig hard drive which I replaced with an old 320.
This computer has serial ATA so a good source for cheap replacement
drives is to get a (now) small external hard drive for close to
nothing. Almost all Optiplex computers older than the newest ones,
have floppy drives. This last little computer cost me $139 not
including the upgrade to a larger drive. It came with Win XP proSP3
for refurbished computers and even has an installation disc. This
computer will never be connected to the internet so updates are not
necessary but they can be gotten for as long as microsoft supports XP
which will probably be for a few more years.

Sunday, January 31, 2010, 5:25:31 PM, you wrote: >   
> Your last sentience says it all.
> I have always and will always keep an older system running WIN-ME
> with a bare minimum of utilities. It has 1 CDRW and one DVDRW as
> well as a 3 1/2 inch floppy drive. 
> As time goes on you will find there are a lot of things that the
> latest and greatest will not (allow) you to do.
> With ME you can always drop to DOS as well.
> All this costs now is a little space as the "resale value" of a system that old is $0.00
> Kindest regards
> Frank
> Frank & Gean Evans
> www.hfevans.com
> www.mcatos.org
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: kenmortgages 
> To: disklavier@yahoogroups.com 
> Sent: Sunday, January 31, 2010 6:08 PM
> Subject: [disklavier] Disc Copying - and Obsolete Technology

>   

> Morning all

> I thought I'd post this warning about new technology as I spent
> hours yesterday searching for the answer. Last week I took posession
> of a few more PianoSoft Plus disks from the US. I never use original
> disks - always a copy and mostly from the hard drive attached to the Disklavier, using YAMPlayer.

> The problem - I have recently upgraded my workhorse desktop and no
> longer have a floppy drive inbuilt; I use a USB floppy which I
> transfer from PC to Notebook etc. To my horror I found that whilst I
> could boot from a DOS disk and load dkvcopy from the USB floppy, the
> program wouldn't recognise the PianoSoft disk in the floppy drive.
> Looking on Carol's website I came across a few other programs -
> riparoot for DOS and rootaripper for XP from the command window.
> Neither program worked with the USB floppy.

> Solution - in a friend's office this morning, I used his old XP
> with in-built floppy drive - and low and behold, immediate sucess
> with all of the above programs! I appears that the USB drive is not
> recognised by the operating system even though I can boot from that
> drive, copy files and so forth. This is quite a worrying thing as
> most notebooks from about 2000 onwards don't have an inbuilt floppy
> drive, and most desktop motherboards don't contain a IDE output for
> floppy drives any more (note that to drive a floppy the IDE output
> is 32 pins, and IDE hard drives have 40 pin sockets - which are
> often present beside SATA sockets).

> You may not need to copy/backup PianoSoft files very often but be
> warned you need a floppy drive which runs directly off the
> motherboard. I'll put in some more research but I don't think there
> is a simple answer - other than keeping an old legacy sytem.

> Cheers
> Ken

> 
 

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