Three Years of Hell to Become the Devil: I'm Moonlighting as a Law Student

« Very Long Rebuild Times | Main | Minor Annoyance »

I'm Moonlighting as a Law Student

Sometimes I wonder the degree to which I'm actually a law student, and not a random PC tech support guy. Some of today's note time was again spent getting some critical files off a broken computer.

I think I'm going to get one of these. The most common task I'm asked to accomplish is the recovery of files that someone didn't back up. A hard drive enclosure like this would allow me to pull the hard drive, plug it into my machine (through USB) and burn DVDs of anything that needed recovery. This done, I could just let the user reinstall Windows through a recovery disk.

Of course with my luck, after spending $45.00 on the enclosure, CLS would experience a sudden wave of hardware/software stability and I'd never have to use it. Which is, of course, why I don't just buy the thing.

Posted by Anthony on January 25, 2005 1:22 PM | Permalink

Comments

Bet you didn't plan on getting feedback on this post. ;) But we used these a lot when I worked in tech support, and they were extremely useful. Couple of points: 1) Their quality seems to vary pretty widely, I'm not exactly sure why but they seemed to stop working with alarming regularity. 2) If you have network drives, virtual drives, CD/DVD emulators, etc running with assigned drive letters, WinXP can be pretty uncooperative with recognizing the new drive until you reboot. 3) It is very, very easy to bend/break pins off the IDE connectors when playing with these. 4) Depending on your laptop hard drive, consider getting an adapter to use it with the enclosure. The warning about the pins applies even more strongly here.

Posted by: 1L@CLS | January 26, 2005 2:37 PM

Post a comment

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)

Name:

Email Address:

URL:

Remember personal info?

Comments:

NOTICE TO SPAMMERS, COMMENT ROBOTS, TRACKBACK SPAMMERS AND OTHER NON-HUMAN VISITORS: No comment or trackback left via a robot is ever welcome at Three Years of Hell. Your interference imposes significant costs upon me and my legitimate users. The owner, user or affiliate who advertises using non-human visitors and leaves a comment or trackback on this site therefore agrees to the following: (a) they will pay fifty cents (US$0.50) to Anthony Rickey (hereinafter, the "Host") for every spam trackback or comment processed through any blogs hosted on threeyearsofhell.com, morgrave.com or housevirgo.com, irrespective of whether that comment or trackback is actually posted on the publicly-accessible site, such fees to cover Host's costs of hosting and bandwidth, time in tending to your comment or trackback and costs of enforcement; (b) if such comment or trackback is published on the publicly-accessible site, an additional fee of one dollar (US$1.00) per day per URL included in the comment or trackback for every day the comment or trackback remains publicly available, such fee to represent the value of publicity and search-engine placement advantages.

Giving The Devil His Due

And like that... he is gone (8)
Bateleur wrote: I tip my hat to you - not only for ... [more]

Law Firm Technology (5)
Len Cleavelin wrote: I find it extremely difficult to be... [more]

Post Exam Rant (9)
Tony the Pony wrote: Humbug. Allowing computers already... [more]

Symbols, Shame, and A Number of Reasons that Billy Idol is Wrong (11)
Adam wrote: Well, here's a spin on the theory o... [more]

I've Always Wanted to Say This: What Do You Want? (14)
gcr wrote: a nice cozy victorian in west phill... [more]