A minor vent! Not about anything important, just about something annoying.

[OBIO]

When I took Deb over to her sister's place today, so Deb could tend to Jack (dying dad) while her sis went to work, I ended up tearing apart two computers and building one. The case, cooling fans, optic drives, media card reader from my SIL's HP Pavillion with a dead MOBO (blown capacitor) and the MOBO/CPU, 500watt PSU, video card and HD from my nephew's system...which runs great but the case is beat to death. Took a couple hours to tear everything down, clean all the carpet sprinkle dust, dog hair, cobwebs and such from all the parts and to reconstruct the mess as a Frankenstein system. Fired right up...even with all the errors and nasties that were on my nephew's HD from all the bit torrent downloading he did.

Came home to do some stuff at home and got a call from my SIL. She had rebooted the system and it would not start. I grab some bootable utility discs, the original HP recovery discs that belonged to my SIL's system, hopped in the Blue Econo-Lodge on Wheels (my nickname for our 7 passenger minivan) and went back over.

Turns out the HD went belly up...taking with it a large number of files that my SIL dearly wants and needs. I have it here on my desk, going to put it in my system as a slave drive and see if I can recover the files (the HD spins, just has a lot of bad sectors or somesuch).

Swapped out the dead HD for the much larger HD from my SIL's original system, formatted, reinstalled XP. Began the download and install of Service Pack 3...manually, not the Windows Automatic Update way. When the install got to the 75% mark, the system froze. Solid. I hit Control Alt Delete and found that the stoopid HP Update System (which I had taken out of the Start UP list) had somehow reactivated itself and had decided to do an automatic update of its own...thus locking the system.

So, now I have to reformat, reinstall and begin the update all over again. Tomorrow. I am done working on that particular system for this day.

Just one more reason that, if I ever get the funds for a new system, I will build my own system and not buy one off the shelf. By building the system myself, I know that it will not be packed with all the useless, pointless bloatware crap that is stuffed onto ready-made systems.

OBIO

[Stratobat]

Hey Obio,


Just one more reason that, if I ever get the funds for a new system, I will build my own system and not buy one off the shelf. By building the system myself, I know that it will not be packed with all the useless, pointless bloatware crap that is stuffed onto ready-made systems.

I wish manufacturers would just put all the bloatware on a disc!

Regards,
Stratobat

[stormtrooper271]

Bloatware sucks! Nothing more annoying than playing FS and suddenly "An HP tuneup has been started" which slows the system waaaay down and it is pretty much useless until the tuneup is over.

[Chacha]

Hey Obio,



I wish manufacturers would just put all the bloatware on a disc!

Regards,
Stratobat


I am wishing with you there, Stratobat!

[TeaSea]

Fortunately you'll probably be able to salvage the data. I've had several drives go belly up, and have never lost the data off the drive.

Now, I've forgotten where I've put it.......but that's another problem.

And I'm glad to see you're succesful with your own non-militarized BLOW (Blue Econo-Lodge on Wheels).

[OBIO]

Concerning the HD that went belly up. I was able to recover the pics and files that my sis-in-law wanted/needed...but it took about 4 hours of head scratching to get it done. The HD experienced an outbreak of broken file strings (don't know the real term for the condition...when the various bits and pieces of files are no longer linked together..broken fragments I guess). These broken files were right at the area of the User/Application Data/My Documents/my Pictures part of the drive. Luckily I have a nice collection of bootable utility discs that were able to reattach most of the file fragments back together. At some point, my nephew had a password on the My Documents folder....once I had it stitched back together, I could not access the folder through Windows...not even in Safe Mode. Luckily, one of the bootable utility discs I have has a file manager/explorer utility on it...and I was able to access the files using it because there was very little Windows in operation. Once I got into the My Documents folder, I found that a lot of the files were lost....so I ran 2 file recovery utilities and was able to recover nearly all of the documents. Once I had that done, I copied the documents to my HD using the file manager utility. 11.2 gigs of my sis-in-law's photos and documents were recovered, duplicated onto one of my HDs, onto a 20gig portable HD and will soon be put back onto her HD and then burnt to DVD.

The HD that went belly up...an 80gig HD that was refurbished to MAXTOR standards (which in my book are not all that high) on November 13, 2004....will never again see the inside of a computer. I'm going to open the drive up so that Deb and Tina (my SIL) can see what the inside of a HD looks like.

Tim

[TeaSea]

Absolutely concur with you there. Once a drive has demonstrated bad habits....deep six it.

Not worth the effort or the risk. The data is more important.

Glad to see you got most everything back. As I said, I've always managed to get data back, but sometimes it's been a pain.

[Stratobat]

I am wishing with you there, Stratobat!

Hey Chacha,

I'd even settle for a folder on the desktop with all the bloatware setup files inside.

People should have the choice.



The HD that went belly up...an 80gig HD that was refurbished to MAXTOR standards (which in my book are not all that high) on November 13, 2004....will never again see the inside of a computer. I'm going to open the drive up so that Deb and Tina (my SIL) can see what the inside of a HD looks like.

Hey Obio,

Turn it into a clock or something :jump:

Regards,
Stratobat