Sean's Technical Talk corner:

A friend asked me to have a look at his laptop and see why it was randomly freezing up. I wanted to clear off the old system (which looked pretty messed up) and reinstall the operating system. After I had repartitioned the hard drive (the point of no return, all his old stuff was GONE) I found that the drive had fatal errors and was toast. So, this is me going out to buy ond of those teeny, tiny form factor hard drives and wedge it into the ultra-compact, non-user-serviceable super-slim laptops.

Well, guess what? I got it in. I had to remove about 37 little screws, drop out the keyboard, pop out the DIMM, partially pry open the case, remove the CPU cooling fan and get my big ol' hands into the tiny innards to remove eight more screws and the drive rails along with the hard drive. After finding an EXCELLENT price on a big laptop hard drive I was able to put everything back together, not have a single screw left over (or missing) and I got everything installed and restored. Now it works good as new. The hard part may be convincing my buddy that he really needed to spend $300 on the new hard drive.

So, how about that IEEE 1394 standard? Do you think it will pass the mustard?

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If you found the above interesting, go have a look at this hard drive modification, or print this jargon file out on your old nine-pin and read it while you're sitting on the can in the bathroom.

Ar! Ar! Ar!