Got my new HDD adapter, works well

I did finally get my hard drive adapter, and it works really well. True to my procrastinating nature, I have yet to download the data therein, which I have coveted so greedily ever since the Big Crash. I'm different.

Try, try again, to adapt

I bought an adapter recently to try and overcome the loss of data that occurred when my laptop failed and I was left wishing I'd made more recent backups. The adapter gizmo I bought should have installed inside my desktop machine's case and allowed me to use the laptop drive like a regular hard drive.

For reasons about which I'm still uncertain, it didn't work. The desktop didn't recognize the drive, as if I should done something different with the jumpers. Since I don't have laptop jumpers nor a simple/nearby place to get them, I went a different route.

I've gone and ordered a USB hard drive enclosure, that should give me similar functionality without the hassle of cracking the case and diggling with jumpers. Who needs that?

New 'top

I am currently blogging from and building the foundation of my new laptop.

Dell hurt my feelings last time (by sneakily denying me a Windows XP CD and not warning me that their Inspirons suffer from a design flaw that will surely and unexpectedly booty-hump them), so I excluded them from my search for a new portable lap-lover.

I ended up getting a new HP from Best-Buy, finding the right mix of features vs. cost. It so far is quite acceptable, and although I do not yet love Windows Vista Home Premium, I am still open to it. Time will tell the tale.

So, I soldier on through the somewhat tedious, yet still enviable, task of setting up a brand-spanking-new machine.

New bells, new whistles. What fun.

Inspiron 100 - relinquished the spirit...?

Oh, dear... I am coming to grips with the fact that my Inspiron 1000 (apparently geekspeak for "cheap bastard") laptop has given up the ghost.

It's spontaneously powered down on me once or twice, and I fear that today's was the last gasp. I gots no lights, not even a twinkle, not even on the AC power light. Oh, I am afraid this one's not coming back.

I've been watching the pile of silicon and dog shit degrade for a while. It hasn't done much that indicated a real meltdown, just gotten apparently slower, and the CD/DVD drive hasn't been right in over a year. The hard drive crashed a while back, and that was enough of an ordeal, and now this. Poop.

When the hard drive failed, I learned a few things:

• Dell didn't give me the OS CD's that should have come with it - they waited for me to find out on my own in my darkest computing hour. Shit, they could have e-mailed me at any time, confirmed my address, and shipped them. That would've been the thing to do for a company that valued its customers.
• Dell's Inspiron laptops aren't all that sturdy
• A helpful guy named Rick (working at Dell? I think so, but cannot now remember; nor can I read the e-mail dfrom that time which is on the hard drive of my laptop) read my blogged wail and did contact me, effectively talking me off the ledge. I'd like to buy him some beer.

I don't know that other manufacturers are any better, but I'm certainly going to give them a look, going forward. After all this fun, I'm certainly not happy enough to beeline my dumb, lemming ass back to Dell without comparison shopping.

I would like to be able to recover the data. I know better than to not make frequent backups. Once again, my laziness has caught up with me. Ah, well... C'est la vie.

Web browsing - not just for Celerons anymore

Whew. When I bought this moderately cheap laptop, I skimped a bit on the processor and memory.

The conventional wisdom was that if your computing needs were light (e-mail, web browsing, word processing, etc.), you could be quite happy with a lightweight machine. If your needs were heavier (3-D gaming, movie editing, sound editing, etc.), you'd need a phat Pentium with buckets of memory to be happy.

Eventually, the day came when my laptop would bog down under the simplest of tasks, like e-mail and two web browser windows. First, I figured the hard drive suffered from the clutter of having too many programs installed/uninstalled on a Windows OS. Then, I assumed it was the grinding mechanical failure of the hard drive itself, which I replaced.

With my new, uncluttered hard drive, I'd open two Firefox windows, and time would stretch inside-out. Paging down would occur in jumpy fits and starts; switching windows became an exercise in patience, not an eye-blink. I realized that almost any window I'd open in Firefox would pour sand into my computer's gears, and wouldn't relent until I closed it. Not Firefox! I can't go back to IE, I just can't!!

I furthered narrowed down the problem to Flash doo-hickeys in web pages. Rarely are Flash components simple anymore - they aim for fast downloads, moving the bottleneck from bandwidth to processor, and dragging my machine to a crawl.

It was good news, though. Finally, a manageable point in the process! I slipped over to Firefox's website, and downloaded an extension that disables Flash components. Nice! Now, an icon sits where a cycle-gobbling Flash app would normally sprawl its fat ass, and if you want to enact it, just click on it!

Huzzah! Now I can load several pages of text and images, just as God intended it, without slowing my laptop to a time-lapse photography version of a normal PC operation. I am functional again!

Got my new hard drive

I got my new laptop hard drive. Now, it's just a matter of the heady task of installing the new drive, and hoping that a) all goes well, and b) it restores this old clunker to its former glory.

Ah, the waters are receding

Whatever torture I have so richly deserved for the past weeks (and months, and years, but who's counting?) has thankfully begun to subside these last few days. My laptop is still wheezing but working, the Dell CDs came next-day via special delivery, and my DSL guy finally came out and put my signal back on its feet and off of its knees. It's almost like I can breathe again.

The upside is that I had begun to find things to do in the analog world: my wife re-upped my subscription to a real, ink-and-paper newspaper service, I cleaned up the place, and some other stuff that was worthwhile and non-digital. Maybe now though, I can meld the two, or at least read my little daily list of bookmarked pages with my morning coffee, as God intended.

Whatever sentence I've been serving in digital limbo/Hell, I am glad to be at least on probation. Let's hope I stay on the Digital Deity's good side. Amen.

Dell - savior or Satan?

Dell doesn't send Windows software CDs with new systems

After my desperate, blogged complaint of my Dell laptop succumbing to the forces of entropy, I received an unexpected note from a Dell representative, advising me that I can contact Dell to get copies of the WinXP OS that I so badly need. Come to find out that the reason they'll happily send them to me is that they never sent them to me in the first place!

Oh yeah - apparently, it's policy. What the blazing Hell...? When you buy a new machine from a big, reputable name, you also buy the OS. How the bleeding Christ can you justify not sending the CDs with the new system?

Now, somewhere out there is a Dell guy surfing blog entries - it must be how he found the last one, and so-generously left me a helpful comment. And I appreciate that. When he finds this one, I would like to explain the previous, rabid paragraph thusly:

When I got near the lowest point a computer consumer ever hopes to get to, on the brink of total system failure, I reach for my magic bullet. During digital freefall, I reached for the ripcord on my silicon parachute, and I found absolutely nothing. I thrashed around the house like a blinded ape for two hours, racking both my brain and my evermore-cluttered home office, looking for software that just had to be there. Looking for software that I had never needed before, and so had never searched for before.

Reaching into the abyss and pulling back nothing, I was quite upset, and instantly deluded my guilty conscience that I must have misplaced the CD's that I lacked. Why, it must be the only answer, since it would be hideously unorthodox to not include them with a new machine. Only software pirates need fear this type of inconvenience/gripping terror - I paid for my shit! What is this, "Bargain Bob's Big Box Computer Warehouse??" No, no, certainly this must be my error in losing the disks, and what a fool I am to have put myself in such a position!

And so it was a relief but still jarring that I found I hadn't directly caused myself all that torture, but that it was provided to me by a wrong-headed corporate policy. Yeesh!

Your name isn't really Phillip, is it?

Following that revelation, I got to spend over 90 minutes on the phone with "Phillip," a very nice gentleman from east Asia who either due to language skills or lousy intercontinental phone connection took no less than five tries to collect EACH discreet piece of contact data. I had to spend several minutes stating, repeating and even describing ("no, there are five digits in my zip code...") my street name, telephone number, zip code, city name, e-mail address, etc. Frustrating for both of us, I'm sure, but shit, at least he was getting paid to do it.

Then he called me back to tell me he won't be sending me the CDs for the older Dimension system, because it's not under warranty. Madness! I rebuked his attempt to snatch away my just-won CD, and told him that they were never sent in the first place. After a brief discussion with his supervisor, he advised me he'd send them. I'll feel a lot more secure when they are actually in-hand.

So I must say thanks to Rick at Dell in Texas, for going the extra mile and clueing me into the fact that my OS CD's can be found somewhere, anywhere. That's just the kind of thing that keeps a customer loyal. And big, hairy bollocks to Dell for disincluding said CD's as a matter of course. That's just the sort of thing that scares customers away.

Laptop down

My laptop is seriously troubled, possibly boned. It spent about 5 hours running a hard drive scan, dispatching bad sector after bad sector. It seems to be working now, but my faith in the thing is shot.

Even worse, I don't seem to have the Dell/WinXP disks I thought I had, with which to mop up this impending mess. This surprising lack of media strikes at my very core, and I had to take a deep breath, step back, and crack a beer before I put something through the nearest wall. The rest of the day has been salvaged, but only as a result of fastidious control of nearly uncontrollable rage.

So, that's how it's going... I am so disheartened.