You Win Some....and You Lose Some

I really hate losing, but sometimes it happens and you have to give in and decide to stop throwing time away. I had a client who a few years ago bought an IBM ThinkPad R52 from me and he (mostly his family) have been rough on their machines. They have 4 of my machines and one HP desktop that I rebuilt for him in their house.....and they have to have the OS rebuilt on a regular basis. A week ago, he brought me the two ThinkPads, one of which had a simple WiFi settings issue that I resolved and sent right back, but the other "blue-screened" immediately on Windows start up. "No big deal", I thought; I can just pull the drive, connect it to one of my USB adapters and pull the files off. Then I'll put it back in and reload the OS from restore disks.....no fuss, no muss. 

That was the plan anyway. Several days, and twice as many different data recover utilities later, the drive steadfastly refused to mount....on any computer. So I put it in the (previously) fail-safe backup, which is to use a ThinkPad drive adapter that fits in their UltraBay. I don't know why that one always worked; maybe it give the drive a little more voltage, but that failed too! Down to the last straw, I put it in the freezer over night and gave that old technique a try. Still no joy. So, I'm going to write it off as a mystery since I don't hear anything physically wrong with it like rattling or even the dreaded clicking.

Now, on to the "Win Some" part. NO, that's not a bigger picture of the bad drive, it's a 500Gb Travelstar. I've always coveted these big drives, but never could pull the trigger on one given their price and my lack of real need for one. But the other day, I was having to go up to the Carrollton suburb of Dallas to pick up that $99 HP desktop for our friends as well as a copy of OS X "Snow Leopard" to restore the MacBook when I came across and ad for one of these for $40 on Craig's List. I texted the guy and promptly forgot about it. A few hours later he texted me back to say that he still had it, but someone was going to buy it, so I offered him $35 and asked him to call me if his buyer didn't materialize. I was in Irving which is the far side of Dallas. Anyway, while I was up in Carrollton running around picking stuff up, he calls to say that I can have the drive for $35 and that he'd meet me on my way home: BONUS! Sometimes you see things on CL that are great deals, but it's not worth the time and gas to go get it at the various far-flung parts of the Metro-plex. 

 On the way home, I swung in to Mesquite and picked up one of the many Dell Latitude D6x0 Series machines that I've sold. This was a computer that I recently had to completely rebuild and move to an new base, because the client dropped it while it was running! Well, I got it back to him the other day, but he called me back to say that after that first time at McDonald's, he could never get it to connect again via WiFi. So I got it home and did the usual things to it like going with a different connection manager (Dell vs. Windows), dumped and reload drivers, but still no go. I did notice that it was hanging on to a weird IP that it was using with the Ethernet. So I surmised that it was having an issue with TCP/IP. Sure enough, after a little bit of Googling, I came across a post of somebody talking about a corruption in the TCP/IP stack that was messing up Winsockets. I hadn't heard Winsockets since the Windows 3.11 days when you had to load and set that up yourself! So I had it do a rebuild (using DOS) and it magically fixed the problem. 

On a side note, the Snow Leopard disk I picked up was used to clear and reload the MacBook I bought in the pawn shop and is now listed on Craig's List for twice what I paid for it. I guess I should have really called this post, Win Some and Lose One. Still hate losing any though.....