Do I win a Darwin Award nomination......?

I've decided to upgrade the memory in my Vostro 1700 laptop from the
installed 2GB to 4GB.

So I remove the battery and then set about removing the hinge cover and
keyboard (yes, DIMM A lives under the keyboard).

I've got the Dell manual on my desktop monitor and it's all plain sailing.

So........the laptop's reassembled and I press the power button.

Nothing.

Sh1t...........I've obviously done something clumsy, best take it all apart
again and double check everything.

To cut a long story short..........I forgot all about the battery, no wonder
the laptop wouldn't fire up.

Am I FIK or what?!

Ah, that's nothing. Years ago I had a hard drive fail on me while my
Dell PC was still under warranty. Dell offered to send a tech to my
house to replace the drive, but I was too proud to agree, so Dell just
sent the new drive. Here's where it gets fun.

I opened the case and proceeded to remove the /floppy drive/ instead of
the bad hard drive. Hey, from inside the case, who knows what everything
is, right? Then I tried to cram my new hard drive into the space for the
floppy drive and of course it wouldn't fit, so I shoved until I /almost/
got it in. Then there was another problem: The ribbon cable for a floppy
drive doesn't fit into the IDE connector of a hard drive.

Finally, I gave up and called Dell. Two days later, a tech showed up and
fixed everything. I'm sure I'm in some kind of Hall of Fame in Austin.

Daddy

Craven Moorhead wrote:
> I've decided to upgrade the memory in my Vostro 1700 laptop from the
> installed 2GB to 4GB.
>
> So I remove the battery and then set about removing the hinge cover and
> keyboard (yes, DIMM A lives under the keyboard).
>
> I've got the Dell manual on my desktop monitor and it's all plain sailing.
>
> So........the laptop's reassembled and I press the power button.
>
> Nothing.
>
> Sh1t...........I've obviously done something clumsy, best take it all
> apart again and double check everything.
>
> To cut a long story short..........I forgot all about the battery, no
> wonder the laptop wouldn't fire up.
>
> Am I FIK or what?!

"Craven Moorhead" <postmaster@127.0.0.1> wrote in message
news:6u_Qk.84184$ om...
> I've decided to upgrade the memory in my Vostro 1700 laptop from the installed 2GB
> to 4GB.

> To cut a long story short..........I forgot all about the battery, no wonder the
> laptop wouldn't fire up.
>
> Am I FIK or what?!

I had a set of 5.1 speakers that my son and I were hooking up new out of the box.

When I went to test them, the front, center and rear speakers all sounded great
but the subwoofer made a great imitation of a torn cone. It was rattling
terribly. I yelled a few "computer fixing" words (the same ones golfers sometimes
use) but no luck. I was getting ready to unplug everything and send it back to the
store
when my son said, "Wait, Dad." He got under the desk where the subwoofer is
and emerged holding a thin plastic sheet that had been stuck over the speaker to
protect it during shipping. I love that kid!

Tom Lake

On Nov 7, 2:22*pm, "Tom Lake" <tl...@twcny.rr.com> wrote:
> "Craven Moorhead" <postmas...@127.0.0.1> wrote in message
>
> news:6u_Qk.84184$ om...
>
> > I've decided to upgrade the memory in my Vostro 1700 laptop from the installed 2GB
> > to 4GB.
> > To cut a long story short..........I forgot all about the battery, no wonder the
> > laptop wouldn't fire up.
>
> > Am I FIK or what?!
>
> I had a set of 5.1 speakers that my son and I were hooking up new out of the box.
>
> When I went to test them, the front, center and rear speakers all soundedgreat
> but the subwoofer made a great imitation of a torn cone. *It was rattling
> terribly. *I yelled a few "computer fixing" words (the same ones golfers sometimes
> use) but no luck. *I was getting ready to unplug everything and send itback to the
> store
> when my son said, "Wait, Dad." *He got under the desk where the subwoofer is
> and emerged holding a thin plastic sheet that had been stuck over the speaker to
> protect it during shipping. *I love that kid!
>
> Tom Lake

My 1st machine was an HP that had a flakey Maxtor "Big-Foot" HDD that
I had to reload every 2 weeks to a month before I figured out it was
the HD and not Win95.
I got to were I could reload and be back online in 20 min.

wrote:
> On Nov 7, 2:22 pm, "Tom Lake" <tl...@twcny.rr.com> wrote:
>> "Craven Moorhead" <postmas...@127.0.0.1> wrote in message
>>
>> news:6u_Qk.84184$ om...
>>
>>> I've decided to upgrade the memory in my Vostro 1700 laptop from the installed 2GB
>>> to 4GB.
>>> To cut a long story short..........I forgot all about the battery, no wonder the
>>> laptop wouldn't fire up.
>>> Am I FIK or what?!
>> I had a set of 5.1 speakers that my son and I were hooking up new out of the box.
>>
>> When I went to test them, the front, center and rear speakers all sounded great
>> but the subwoofer made a great imitation of a torn cone. It was rattling
>> terribly. I yelled a few "computer fixing" words (the same ones golfers sometimes
>> use) but no luck. I was getting ready to unplug everything and send it back to the
>> store
>> when my son said, "Wait, Dad." He got under the desk where the subwoofer is
>> and emerged holding a thin plastic sheet that had been stuck over the speaker to
>> protect it during shipping. I love that kid!
>>
>> Tom Lake
>
> My 1st machine was an HP that had a flakey Maxtor "Big-Foot" HDD that
> I had to reload every 2 weeks to a month before I figured out it was
> the HD and not Win95.
> I got to were I could reload and be back online in 20 min.

Yes, HP and Compaq were both victims of the Quantum Bigfoot drive. This
may explain why the HPaq merger has gone so well once Carly was out of
the way. Both companies had cheap cheap cheap procurement departments.

I once bought a quantity of surplus Bigfoot drives from Compaq. I sold
them all on eBay and had to give refunds for a couple.

The Bigfoot is the perfect example of the idiocy that can take place
between bean counters and engineers. Quantum tried a new approach to
putting metal oxide coating on disk platters and the process was
imprefect, leaving a lot of bad spots. Some dim-bulbs decided to build
1/2 height 5 1/4" hard drives, figuring that the added surface area
would compensate for the bad spots and yield a reasonable capacity.
Well, the oxide coating was so imperfectly bonded to the platters that
it would flake off, taking data along with it. Nice approach, instead
of scrapping the new coating process and simply retooling. The failure
of the Bigfoot tarnished Quantum's reputation and led to its being
acquired by another set of dim-bulbs, namely Maxtor... Ben Myers

Of course, none you come close to qualifying for a Darwin Award
nomination since no one has done anything that would potentially
remove him from the gene pool, as desireable as that may seem. ;-).

Now, if one of you guys tested for AC power with your tongue, you
might have a case.

Kal

> Nope I got you both beat. The first time I got a pc (mid 80's) I
> installed a few programs on it. Then while I was in learning mode, I
> saw this utility on the hard drive called "wipedisk.exe" and didn't
> know what it did so I decided to try it

A similar thing happened to me, in a round-about way...

I'd written a program on the Amiga, and sent the source to a mate -
who promptly edited it for nefarious reasons to stuff someone else up.

Cue my arrival at his, and upon spotting "my" program with "do not
use" ran it, thinking "why not - I know what it does"... he'd thrown
in a command to wipe the drive of the victim, which ended up being him
:-p

(Hi Geoff !)

Hi!

> Some dim-bulbs decided to build 1/2 height 5 1/4" hard drives, figuring
that the
> added surface area would compensate for the bad spots and yield a
reasonable
> capacity.

It was my understanding that these drives were built to provide budget
computers with enough disk storage to compete with better systems. (I've
never seen one outside of very cheap computers...such as the Compaq Presario
and eMachines of the time.)

> Well, the oxide coating was so imperfectly bonded to the platters that
> it would flake off, taking data along with it. Nice approach, instead
> of scrapping the new coating process and simply retooling. The failure
> of the Bigfoot tarnished Quantum's reputation and led to its being
> acquired by another set of dim-bulbs, namely Maxtor...

Interesting. I've had a lot of the Bigfoot drives through here, and my
experiences were actually pretty good. They weren't particularly fast, but
they were reliable. I still have some running along perfectly; only one ever
failed of "natural" causes. The rest were retired when I took the systems
using them out of service and sold or gave them away.

That's a lot more than I can say for the 3.5" Fireball and similar drives.
"Fireball" was a good description. These drives didn't fail so much--they
just acted very, very strangely. I built walls out of the dead ones pulled
from HP Vectra VL, VA and VE computers coming out of a large insurance
company. They were being donated to area schools, and I helped recondition a
lot of them. A lot of otherwise good computers landed in the trash (or, more
accurately, they were quietly placed in the back of my pickup truck) only
for the want of a good hard drive. It just wasn't in the budget for the
donated hardware--those didn't work for any reason beyond the most minor
stuff were gutted or dumped. This is, I think, the reason why Quantum left
the disk business.

Quantum's hard drive line was bought by Maxtor and I've even seen some
rebadged Fireballs with the Maxtor logo. Quantum itself still remains as a
tape storage vendor. Rather amazingly, Seagate has maintained the Quantum
drive information.

William

William R. Walsh wrote:
> Hi!
>
>> Some dim-bulbs decided to build 1/2 height 5 1/4" hard drives, figuring
> that the
>> added surface area would compensate for the bad spots and yield a
> reasonable
>> capacity.
>
> It was my understanding that these drives were built to provide budget
> computers with enough disk storage to compete with better systems. (I've
> never seen one outside of very cheap computers...such as the Compaq Presario
> and eMachines of the time.)
>
>> Well, the oxide coating was so imperfectly bonded to the platters that
>> it would flake off, taking data along with it. Nice approach, instead
>> of scrapping the new coating process and simply retooling. The failure
>> of the Bigfoot tarnished Quantum's reputation and led to its being
>> acquired by another set of dim-bulbs, namely Maxtor...
>
> Interesting. I've had a lot of the Bigfoot drives through here, and my
> experiences were actually pretty good. They weren't particularly fast, but
> they were reliable. I still have some running along perfectly; only one ever
> failed of "natural" causes. The rest were retired when I took the systems
> using them out of service and sold or gave them away.
>
> That's a lot more than I can say for the 3.5" Fireball and similar drives.
> "Fireball" was a good description. These drives didn't fail so much--they
> just acted very, very strangely. I built walls out of the dead ones pulled
> from HP Vectra VL, VA and VE computers coming out of a large insurance
> company. They were being donated to area schools, and I helped recondition a
> lot of them. A lot of otherwise good computers landed in the trash (or, more
> accurately, they were quietly placed in the back of my pickup truck) only
> for the want of a good hard drive. It just wasn't in the budget for the
> donated hardware--those didn't work for any reason beyond the most minor
> stuff were gutted or dumped. This is, I think, the reason why Quantum left
> the disk business.
>
> Quantum's hard drive line was bought by Maxtor and I've even seen some
> rebadged Fireballs with the Maxtor logo. Quantum itself still remains as a
> tape storage vendor. Rather amazingly, Seagate has maintained the Quantum
> drive information.
>
> William
>
>
Count yourself among the very lucky with your mostly positive
experiences with the Quantum Bigfoot drives. The whole deal about the
oxide coating process became public when many of the Big Feet stopped
walking, or spinning. AFAIK, they spun at a leisurely 4200rpm, which is
one thing that made them slow. The other factor was the areal density
of the tracks, with not all that many sectors per track. Definitely the
sow's ear of disk drives... Ben Myers

Hi,

> Now, if one of you guys tested for AC power with your tongue, you might
> have a case.

Not if they are still able to write about it and ask "Do *I* win...".

claudio
--
Claudio Nieder, Talweg 6, CH-8610 Uster, Tel +4179 357 6743,
www.claudio.ch