Techno mama!

Submitted by vkitty17 on Thu, 07/31/2008 - 4:01pm.

So I got this free laptop from my work. No big deal. They were purging all their old junk and distributing it to interested parties. I have this crashed Dell laptop at home that I've been wanting to get the files off of but was too lazy and cheap to go out and buy the equipment I needed to do it. So when this free lappy op came up, I jumped on it!

Last night, a friend of ours came over while I was digging into the guts of old dead Dell. "What are you doing?" he asked?

"I'm switching out these hard drives," I told him.

"You know how to do that?" he exclaimed.

"What?" I said. "You take out this one and put in that one. What?"

When I got to work today I told my co-worker that my plan was successful and she could hardly believe it! I thought, yeah, I'm a little more tech savvy than she is. But when I went into systems and let them in on my supposedly minor success story, they were genuinely aghast!

"Oh my god! That worked! Wow! Do you want a job here?" Uh... Okay I don't know. I guess I thought that the people in systems, the people that worked with computers, would be a little less surprised that I switched out hard drives. I guess I didn't think it would be a big deal. I mean, it doesn't take super powers, does it? Is there some techno secret I don't know about? Was there some law code that I broke? Was I not supposed to be able to do that? I don't know, I just did it. No big.

But I suppose it doesn't matter. I kinda feel good, like something I thought was mediocre was really kind of super. I'd actually never swapped hard drives before, so who knows? I could have burned the house down!

Now I have this Toshiba with a Dell hard drive, and once I get the files off of it and find a wireless card I think I'll give it to my son so he can play some games or watch movies or what have you. Six year olds have their own laptops, right? Anyway, I'll go ahead and take my place on the pedestal here at work as the Techno Mama, even though I still don't think it's that big of a deal!

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Submitted by corbid on Sun, 08/10/2008 - 4:07pm.

While you can always use an old hard drive as a second drive, if you swap the MAIN drives (ie. the one with the operating system on it) it often won't work if it's a Windows machine. This is because when Windows installs, it recognizes and installs drivers for the hardware it is being installed on. Since the "new" computer is usually different hardware, this can lead to minor to major incompatibilities and a lot of times it just won't work at all.

You were either very lucky, or the Goddess is way on your side:)

"Good manners and bad breath will get you nowhere" (Elvis Costello)
Bad manners and varying breath:Exponential Detritus For Feeble Minds...

Submitted by lapina on Thu, 07/31/2008 - 5:39pm.

you did it, it is kind of big that it worked!
Yay for DIYers!

Submitted by turtle on Thu, 07/31/2008 - 4:19pm.

I am complete crap at the whole technology thing. I mean, I know that the internet is not a series of tubes ... but my knowledge is not much better than that! I wouldn't know how to switch out hard-drives to save my life, really. In fact I have a laptop sitting around that I want to get files off of that's been like that for 3 years, I'm too lazy to take it somewhere and pay someone a bunch of $ to do it. And my partner, while he is MUCH better at the techno stuff (which is SUCH a crutch!) I don't think he knows how to do that either! I wish you lived here!!!! Smiling

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