I'm Moonlighting as a Law Student
Sometimes I wonder the degree to which I'm actually a law student, and not a random PC tech support guy. Some of today's note time was again spent getting some critical files off a broken computer.
I think I'm going to get one of these. The most common task I'm asked to accomplish is the recovery of files that someone didn't back up. A hard drive enclosure like this would allow me to pull the hard drive, plug it into my machine (through USB) and burn DVDs of anything that needed recovery. This done, I could just let the user reinstall Windows through a recovery disk.
Of course with my luck, after spending $45.00 on the enclosure, CLS would experience a sudden wave of hardware/software stability and I'd never have to use it. Which is, of course, why I don't just buy the thing.
Comments
Bet you didn't plan on getting feedback on this post. ;) But we used these a lot when I worked in tech support, and they were extremely useful. Couple of points: 1) Their quality seems to vary pretty widely, I'm not exactly sure why but they seemed to stop working with alarming regularity. 2) If you have network drives, virtual drives, CD/DVD emulators, etc running with assigned drive letters, WinXP can be pretty uncooperative with recognizing the new drive until you reboot. 3) It is very, very easy to bend/break pins off the IDE connectors when playing with these. 4) Depending on your laptop hard drive, consider getting an adapter to use it with the enclosure. The warning about the pins applies even more strongly here.
Posted by: 1L@CLS | January 26, 2005 02:37 PM