And How Was YOUR Week in Technology?

February 26, 2007

You have to know that with a title like that, mine was either really, really great…or really, really bad. I’d like to say it was the former but alas, it was the latter.

Let me start with last Tuesday. I work on a project with the Doe Run Resource Recycling facility in Boss, Missouri which is about 50 miles from where I live. Last Tuesday, it was dark and overcast when I left home so I had my headlights on. By the time I got to Doe Run, the sun was out and yep, you guessed it, I left my lights on. By the end of the day, my 6 year old battery was dead as a doornail and no amount of jumpstarting could bring it back to life. Luckily for me, one of the guys I work with, Bob, offered to give me a ride home since he was going in the same direction (thanks, Bob!). I picked up a new battery for the truck and took it back on Thursday. Once again, Bob came to my rescue when I discovered real quick that neither me nor my mom, who was along to assist me, would be able to get the old battery out. After some groaning and a few bloody knuckles, Bob managed to get the old battery out and popped the new one in. I went on my merry way back home, out the price of a new battery but it could have been worse.

Friday morning I got to the office full of anticipation about the upcoming interview with Glenda Watson Hyatt on Views from the Coop Online. My anticipation quickly turned to alarm when the power button on my Gateway laptop (which serves as my main computer) wouldn’t move. It was frozen solid. I pressed and pressed and even gouged around to see if I could get it unstuck but now luck. It was stuck in the off position and was NOT going to move. Luckily for me, I have a backup laptop, an HP, and was able to get set up and do the interview with Glenda, which turned out to be just great and will be available in my podcast schedule sometime this week. After the show, I took my Gateway to my favorite tekkie dude, Bob, at Staples. Bob tried to get the power button to move with no luck so we decided to open it up and see if we could find what was keeping the button from moving. We got so far and chickened out. If you’ve ever worked in the inside of a laptop, you’ll know it’s a LOT different from a desktop and that difference was what made us stop since we were boldly trying to go where neither of us had been before. We tried some more to massage the button loose but it just wasn’t happening. I now have a Gateway paperweight. Actually, everything about the laptop except the power button works just fine only without the power button, what difference does THAT make?

Having been down the “I can’t turn my laptop on” road before with the HP, I started keeping all my files on external hard drives. I have an 80GB Iomega and a 300GB Maxtor. I did, however, leave a few important files on the hard drive of the Gateway that I really do need to retrieve. Luckily for me, I’d just received an e-mail from Karen Thomas of Thomas Public Relations describing a product from Newer Technology called the NewerTech USB 2.0 Universal Drive Adapter that just might be the answer to my dilemma. Unlike some adapter kits that require you to put your hard drive into an enclosure and add it to your PC as a secondary hard drive, this adapter doesn’t require an enclosure AND it plugs right in to any USB port on another PC or laptop. Is that cool, or what? On top of that, I can use it on almost ANY hard drive (ATA/IDE/SATA/ATAPI) so I’m covered if (well, when is more like it) something happens to my husband’s 7 year old HP Pavilion desktop and I need to access his hard drive. I can’t wait to try it out. Like I said, I don’t have a lot of information that I really need to retrieve but what I do need is pretty important. I’ll let you guys know how it works out.

If you’ve heard me say it once, you’ve heard me say it a dozen times: I’m not ungrading to Vista until I have to buy a new computer. Well, the time has come. I can depend on my HP laptop as a backup but I don’t trust it to handle my daily workload on a regular basis. I hold my breath every time I touch the power button because it’s been known not to work either (what is it with me and power buttons?). Actually, I sent it back to HP on 3 different occasions and they never were able to fix it. After having my hard drive re-imaged twice, I sent it back without a hard drive the third time and that convinced them it was NOT a hard drive issue that was causing the laptop not to power up. It has a new system board but I still don’t trust that power button! Anyway, I digress…I bought a new HP Pavilion s7700n Desktop PC from Staples. (No, I didn’t look for a better price online. I happen to like doing business with my local Staples store and I buy almost all of my office supplies and tech stuff from them.) What OS do you think it comes with? You guessed it…Vista! This particular PC comes with Vista Home Premium. I’ve been using XP Pro for several years now and from what I understand, ANY flavor of Vista is going to be a big change. No, I haven’t plugged it in yet. As a matter of fact, I don’t even have it yet. My local store didn’t have any in stock and after checking Staples online, I discovered that it’s out of stock. My buddy, Bob, checked for me and found one at another store not too far away and it’s on its way now. This will be the first time I’ve used a desktop for my main computer in almost 5 years since I like the portability of a laptop. You can be sure I’ll be keeping you up-to-date on the new experience with Vista.

Wow, this turned out to be quite a long post, didn’t it? Before I sign off, don’t forget to leave a comment on this or any of my other posts. You just may end up winning a copy of Diskeeper 2007 Pro Premiere for your effort! See the post on my upcoming interview with Derek DeVette for details.

Posted in Views From The Coop