Thursday, July 14, 2005

Defective hard drive on my Thinkpad T43

Turns out I was wrong about my Thinkpad T43 lasting forever and not needing to be serviced. I have had it for one week now and a couple of times when I tried to reboot or turn off the computer, I would get a memory error of some sort. I turned it into the Kenan-Flagler help desk yesterday and got a call today saying the IBM engineer ran a test on the hard drive and decided it needs to be replaced.

I was very surprised at the diagnosis, because other than the memory error, which happens about one out of every seven occasions, everything was working perfectly. Good thing I am getting this done now before any real work begins and before I have installed anything of real significance (which I define as anything other than AOL software) onto it.

4:30pm update: Just now I started reading a copy of The New York Times I picked up on campus today. It has an article titled "E.R. for Hard Drives." According to the vice president of operations at OnTrack Data Recovery, it's important for everyone to back up his hard drive because "eventually, everyhard drive will fail."

6:10pm update: Now I am getting all paranoid about losing data on my desktop, where I keep most of my precious files. I am beginning to think that maybe a service such as AOL File Backup is not such a bad idea.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

hey there! this is my first time entering a blog! Neato!

Anyhow, I'm sorry Deb and I (btw, I'm using alternate names too) weren't able to say goodbye. Or have you officially moved from up here in NoVa?

Do the chickens have large talons in Chapel Hill?

PS I won't *ever* ask you about that school in Charlottesville :)

Anonymous said...

No, I have not moved to Chapel Hill yet. I am subletting from another student in July, my apartment lease will begin 8/1, and will move my belongings during the first week of August. We are probably going to do a happy hour sometime during that week. Stay tuned and I will announce it here on the blog.

PS: Who are you?