Hard Drive Failure (Maxtor)

Well, here is something to talk about and think about. Hard drives. We all have one in our computers to store our “digital lives”. We all dread the day that we might lose this “life” of ours. Thanks to the internet most of the important stuff like emails are safe. Well I have had a rather tragic incident in the past week.

My external hard drive kinda died on me. Well not really died, just having some power supply problems. It had been set up to back up my computer with time machine every hour and this was all fine and dandy for a week while it worked. One day I just put the mac to sleep and went out, when I got home although I hadn’t realized until late in the night the drive had stopped working. There was no power coming to it. This was on a Saturday. May I just point out now that it is a Maxtor Basics drive made by seagate so it has three year warranty. I had to wait till Monday afternoon to call tech support to have it checked out. They concluded that the power supply might be the problem and obviously said that they would send me a new one in about two weeks time. It hasn’t been two weeks yet so I’m still waiting for it.

The bad news is that if the power supply is not the issue, the hard drive is. I will have to send the drive back to Singapore from New Zealand to have it replaced and this could cost me about $40. I am hoping this does not happen and the new power supply fixes it up.

The overriding concern here is that some brands and makes are just better than others and Maxtor has had a bad spell for a while now, I was just silently hoping I would not become part of the lot that was bad; however, I’m happy that it happened early on so that I will be compensated within warranty. The other concern is my cost to send it as well as the risk to send it so far away for replacement; who really wants to do this? Thirdly, they will not send a new drive but rather a refurbished one (aka repaired one). This drive could possibly be a four year old drive that they have repaired compared to my 3 month old drive.

Some thing to think about Seagate. Ideally we want a new drive.

Anyone have any similar experiences with Maxtor or Seagate or any comments let me know.

The Spray Can

Kathmandu Neoprene Sleeve for Macbook

With my purchase of a new MacBook I have had to look for something to carry it around in. Most folks like neoprene sleeves as they are able to slip it into their bags which they already have; I would prefer to have a backpack, but most people would like a satchel or messenger type. Basically, if you have a Mac the likely choice would be one of the ones offered at the Apple store. STM, Incase and a few others are available. STM is quite nice with it’s bags but those for the 13″ computers are kinda small in size and won’t carry much around apart from the computer itself. I quite like the Alley because it is vertical and doesn’t give that feeling that you are carrying a notebook computer.

Due to the fact that those bags were too small, I went out and had a look at what else was available. Belkin and Targus make quite nice bags, but it is difficult to find one that’ll carry a 13″ notebook. Most are for 15″ and the MacBook would just float around in there. Also, note that messengers start around $70 while backpacks around $130. Sleeves around $40-$60.

So Easter came about and I saw an ad for Kathmandu, they were having their Easter sale, no surprises there. What was a surprise was that they sold bags that could carry laptops. They have a backpack and a messenger and one of those business oldschool type ones as well. The disadvantage is that they take 15″ computers. They were basically half price so around $60-$65 each. I still don’t know whether they are a good deal or not as the sale hasn’t ended and I haven’t bought one yet. I have bought a neoprene sleeve though which might give a bit more protection and bulk so that it is more slug.

The deal with the neoprene is that, it is versatile and can be used with any bag and it is quite popular. However, I would never buy one for $40. I got this one for just $21.54. That’s a bargain and plus the computer fits really snug, not loosely like some of the cases. It has a very basic print on the front of some mountain ranges which is not too intrusive. Also good to note is that the old styles are available all year  round when they have the stock at $25. That’s still pretty good, cause it means you can spend a bit more on the bag if you want one.

All in all, a good buy indeed.

The Spray Can

2Talk Max

Well, there are a few things that nobody can live without. One of them is obviously the internet. Ever wondered what you would do with out it, or what you do when there is an outage.

Anyway, I have chosen 2Talk max to be my ISP and VOIP provider. Beamed wirelessly from the sky tower not too far from my apartment, it gives a similar experience to that of Kidanet in Fiji. The fact that it is Wimax by Alvarion is understood but the Consumer premises equipment is more like that of Unwired- self install, indoor variety. I personally have the $65 a month plan which gives me unlimited traffic on the internet; something that nobody else will rival. They also give a phone line with two local numbers and 500 minutes of calling to landlines in most popular destinations, though this does not include Fiji. Other providers give a 5GB capped connection and landline with local calling only for $80 a month.

The service is excellent for the most part with close to 6 mbit downstream and around 3 mbit upstream speed. Something hard to find in most DSL services. On the other hand, I have had a few outages in the past few days for which I’m not all too pleased about. On the whole though, the service is quite good and cost effective.

The Spray Can