I was going to say that I thought it was unlikely we would need something like the hard drive toaster, that this particular situation was unique and unlikely to occur again... And then a couple of weeks later there was my computer with its guts hanging out, connected to yet another hard drive! It was a different situation; my brother was trying to figure out why he couldn't get an operating system installed on this drive he was using for a spare LAN-party computer. (Answer: Deader than a doornail. Smelled not so great either. Turns out he'd gotten a known bad drive confused with one we know is good but had been misplaced.)
The moral of this story is: thanks for the suggestion! Having one of these hanging around could be very useful and time saving. :)
Re: Internet connection, No, actually! We ended up dumping our connection to the high school about a year ago when it became so unstable that mom got fed-up and bought service from AT&T without consulting the rest of the family. We never could diagnose why it had become so bad, the closest we could get was that Something was interrupting the signal but it wasn't at the house and it wasn't at the high school. Since it was a line-of-sight set-up, it's entirely possible some of the trees between just grew in the way (it's windy enough, frequently enough here that a near-by branch can be a problem at some times and not others), though our other suspicion is that some other frequency was interfering but had no way of tracking that down.
The bad news is lately (well, over the past several months, actually) the AT&T service has become just as bad. Unfortunately I don't have any of the details of our agreement so I keep pushing dad to call support to find out what's going on but he's reluctant because he thinks they'll say the problem is on our end. What's annoying is that it will be PERFECT. For a while. And then it will start dropping or slow dramatically and we haven't quite tracked down a pattern. I'm unhappy that we're paying for this. It was one thing to have unreliable internet for free, quite another to pay for crap.
I was going to say that I thought it was unlikely we would need something like the hard drive toaster, that this particular situation was unique and unlikely to occur again...
And then a couple of weeks later there was my computer with its guts hanging out, connected to yet another hard drive!
It was a different situation; my brother was trying to figure out why he couldn't get an operating system installed on this drive he was using for a spare LAN-party computer. (Answer: Deader than a doornail. Smelled not so great either. Turns out he'd gotten a known bad drive confused with one we know is good but had been misplaced.)
The moral of this story is: thanks for the suggestion! Having one of these hanging around could be very useful and time saving. :)
Re: Internet connection,
No, actually! We ended up dumping our connection to the high school about a year ago when it became so unstable that mom got fed-up and bought service from AT&T without consulting the rest of the family.
We never could diagnose why it had become so bad, the closest we could get was that Something was interrupting the signal but it wasn't at the house and it wasn't at the high school. Since it was a line-of-sight set-up, it's entirely possible some of the trees between just grew in the way (it's windy enough, frequently enough here that a near-by branch can be a problem at some times and not others), though our other suspicion is that some other frequency was interfering but had no way of tracking that down.
The bad news is lately (well, over the past several months, actually) the AT&T service has become just as bad. Unfortunately I don't have any of the details of our agreement so I keep pushing dad to call support to find out what's going on but he's reluctant because he thinks they'll say the problem is on our end. What's annoying is that it will be PERFECT. For a while. And then it will start dropping or slow dramatically and we haven't quite tracked down a pattern.
I'm unhappy that we're paying for this. It was one thing to have unreliable internet for free, quite another to pay for crap.
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You're welcome.
>Internet
My family also uses AT&T so let us commiserate together. :)
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