I went to bed at 9 o-clock today. Nine in the morning...
I love fiddling with computers and got a chance to troubleshoot the failing hard-drive on a Dell Inspiron 600M laptop, that is not quite a year old. We couldn't get the computer to boot from the Window's disk. I ended up having to format the hard drive (which wipes all your files) and had the laptop working this morning and all the software reloaded.
Then...the dreaded "DST Short Test Fail Error Code 1000-0146" showed up again on the diagnostics about 7 am. I like to play with computers and found this exercise educational and fun in a way...granted not like "I'm going to Disneyland fun"...but still fun. It would have been nice to have a fully functional laptop after 10 or 12 hours of reading, loading, reloading, diagnosing etc. but the laptop is still under warranty and I know what's wrong with it now.
I called Dell and after about half an hour of talking to a robot got through to a nice guy named Sylvester. We agreed he will ship me a new 60 gig hard drive this week.
Three lessons from that experience -
(a) don't buy a computer unless the seller includes the operating system and other program disks. Some stores will sell you a computer without the OS or program disks. That doesn't work so good if your hard drive flakes out. It's probably okay if you are the sort who would bring a computer to a technician for repair anyway, but if you have any intention of do-it-yourself repair, make sure you get the disks.
(b) hard drives are really easy to take out of a Dell Inspiron 600M laptop. The HD is a module held by a single screw and is easy to remove (no disassembly of the computer required), it just slides out from the side.
The time consuming thing about putting the new HD in won't be the hardware installation...but rather the software installation - finding the right drivers, program disks and various software programs we all download from the internet and depend on...plus a half hour or so to load Windows.
(c) if you are into do-it-yourself computer repair it's best to have at least two computers in your home. It really helps to have a working model for dipping into the internet knowledge bases while you are working on the broken one.
I'm looking forward to getting that new hard drive in the mail - installing, formatting and reloading it will give me something to play around with next weekend.
Wishing you a great beginning to this week.
