NOT a good day for electronics! I bought a Seagate "FreeAgent" portable hard-disk to get stuff off my workstation at my "day job", and it was DOA out-of-the-box. They said the dreaded "Reduction In Force" words last week at our All Hands meeting, so I've been bringing home personal tools, books, and other junk since then. I figured I'd better get my music and mission pictures off my workstation while I have the chance, since the "layoff" protocol is to hustle you out the door the day before payday with about 10 minutes warning if you've been released. A bit of Googling revealed that these things are JUNK. When I first plugged it in, it popped up as an "Unknown Device" in Windows. Not only did windows not know what it was, but it declared the device to be a "Malfunctioning USB Device", an error message I've never seen before, and I've seen most of them. After screwing around trying different USB ports, getting the software directly from Seagate, and searching the Web, I gave up, and packed it back up. I took it back to Best Buy, got a store credit, and bought a Western Digital unit. Got back home, turned on the home theater, and was just about to open the box and look at the new drive, and WHAM! My entire home theater system shut down, accompanied by a strange whistling noise. Turns out the batteries in the UPS I run it on finally gave up the ghost, and the UPS shut down. I guess I deserved that one because it's been squawking at me for a couple of weeks to replace the batteries. I farted around trying to decide if I wanted to buy the battery pack from APC (serious bucks!), from a different online vendor (much better pricing, but shipping LEAD-acid gel cells kills you!), or just get replacement batteries from good old Torrance Electronics down the street.
Since T.E. was closed for the day, I went back to Best Buy for a new UPS. It's not a pure sine wave UPS, but since all the stuff plugged into it has switching power supplies, it shouldn't hurt anything. I'll swap out the new one with the original one after I get new batteries, and give the one I bought tonight to my girlfriend who is just using good surge protectors for now.
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<i>The Fisher Saga</i> Continues - Act III -
Been working on this post since right after Thanksgiving. I'm making very good progress on the Fisher, and will most likely power it up...
That sounded like a day that should not have been.
ReplyDeleteI hate most electronic devices anymore.
Yeah, not a pleasant day but everything is working fine now.
ReplyDeletedrjim- A recommendation if I may- Get 3-4 of the cheap multi-gig thumb drives! That is what I use, after too many bad experiences with so called backup external drives.
ReplyDeleteI've got a pile of them, but this was a case of having to get about 50gigs of "personal" data off my PC at work, all in one shot.
ReplyDeleteThe Western Digital "MyBook" external disk worked perfectly, and all my stuff is purged from my work PC.
We're going to have a 10~15% Reduction In Force by the end of the month, and I'm preparing for the worst. The other guys tell me the group I'm won't be touched, but I've heard that too many times in my Aerospace career to put much credence to it!