[BurbankKarl]

Over the years I became the PC administrator for our office, which has 10 PCs.

I would look at a new Dell PC if you can swing it...having 6 screens open at once on Win98 is asking for it...plus that operating system is not supported anymore. If you start adding new drives the drivers might not work, etc.

You can order a new PC with a Zip drive installed. The Zip 250 will read and write to Zip 100 disks and Zip 750 will read your old Zip 100 disks, but will not write to them. I would suggest saving your stuff to CD-R discs in the future.

If you keep your monitor, you can get a good, fast system for cheap, and will be worth it saving your time dissecting your current system.

[RedBloodedAmerican]

Hey, Gateway has a nice refurbed desktop model with a 15" flat panel for under $650. 80GB drive. Get an external zip on a USB. But use the CDRW just like you do the zip and write/erase/rewrite to CD's. Get Nero Burn for a CD copying program, it's the best IMO.

Gateway will have some nice refurbed laptops soon (after people who get them for xmas return them, and after their country stores return any unsold stock; the new ones get sold as refurbs, too). So it might be worth the wait..

No matter what, try to get a pc with 2000 Pro or XP Pro for the OS.

[RedBloodedAmerican]

After re-reading your post; if you don't buy a new system, get a zip on USB. Easy to install. But you might consider going to Windows2k Pro for stability. Find and run Spinrite on your drive to fix it, and clean it up if you are going to stay with Win98 (I assume you run Win98SE) or get a program like gateway's gwscan to write zeroes to it (after you back it all up) and install win2k.

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

I have a mint condition 100mb external Zip drive that connects via the parallel port. It comes with 5 blank 100mb disks, power supply and all the software on multiple CDs.

It's for sale for short money if you're interested.

[martin_fierro]

Check out www.pricewatch.com:

Removable Storage

$42 - Zip 250MB USB
$9 - ZIP 250MB IDE
$9 - ZIP 100MB IDE
$13 - Parallel
$204 - Jaz 2GB
$9 - Adapter
$9 - ...All in Category

[azcap]

ANYTHING THAT IS IMPORTANT TO YOU SHOULD NOT BE ON ZIP MEDIA

I did some print work for a company that had several years worth of artwork and advertising on hundreds of zip disks. Of the ones that were more than 2 or three years old we encountered numerous unreadable disks. If that stuff is important you forget about zip and get it burned in an CD or DVD format. And the "Click of Death" is very aptly named - and very common.

[boris]

Never trust Zip or Jaz drives, or any Iomega product.

Read up on "click of death"; there are a million of them online.

Get a zip external, save your data to CD and trash the drive and media.

I had a brand-new Jaz fail on me. Sent it back under warranty and they sent me a refurb. Would not accept media. Inspection revealed that one of the sintered half-moon bits which grasp the hub had fallen off. I taped it to the drive and sent it back on a new RMA. A third Jaz drive arrived (new), DEAD ON ARRIVAL. I wrote the president of the company a very angry letter and was rewarded with a fourth Jaz...which worked long enough for me to get my data off of it.

I'm selling it, plus 10 2-gig media, plus 4 1-gig media, plus cable, power supply, and SCSI card (Adaptec 2940) on Ebay. Haven't checked the bids but I started the thing at $125 bucks and I pay the shipping.

To get an idea of the size of this "bargain", 1-gb Jaz media "USED" to go for ~$100 new; I believe the 2-gb media debuted at the same price and they reduced the cost of the 1-gb media.

Nothing they make is worth spit...which I learned the hard way.

--Boris