Date: 05/22/06 (Computer Help)    Keywords: no keywords

My hard drive is about to die. I've been hanging onto it for years because the computer I bought it with didn't come with a Windows CD and I can't afford to buy one. It sounds like shredding metal so I know it's about to die.

About a month ago, a friend gave me an "old" computer of hers (it's not old at all). I haven't used it at all because I can't get it online. I guess the modem doesn't work. It's an IBM ThinkCentre, runs XP, 256MB RAM, and something like 2.8GHz which is better than my generic barebones kit that I'm using now. So, never having had an XP computer before, I thought you had no control over the devices. But a friend online said that she can see the devices on her XP computer through device manager. Well, on the XP IBM, the device manager is EMPTY. There's NOTHING there. I mean it is BLANK. Think of an empty white image in MSPaint. Yes - it's BLANK. So I have no control over that machine and I can't find out why the modem doesn't work. And since I have a ton of additional hardware in this computer to transfer over to that one.... I'm afraid none of it's going to work because I won't be able to see the devices in the device manager. What's wrong??? I need control over that machine and I need it now. I'm beyond frustrated with the empty device manager. I can't do anything without a device list!!!

Also - is the file system in XP the same as ME? I also have a 2nd hard drive (relatively new) for storage and I don't want to lose everything by having to format it.

Source: http://community.livejournal.com/computer_help/629922.html