Nearly two months at my new job, and I haven't quit or been fired. I"m still learning, and getting comfortable, and still making mistakes now and then. But I am moving into the tech area more and more now.
Today I spoke with two customers with Dell computers still under warranty. One was a laptop that had some strange random problems with icons and programs, another was a brand new state-of-the-art Dell XPS that had yet to boot up cleanly into Windows.
Both pc's were under warranty, and both customers had given up on Dell support, citing language barriers, the fact that the tech support people did not seem to listen to them, and did not go beyond a set of canned suggestions for them to try, all to no avail...
The Dell support was free, but they were ready to pay us up front to diagnose the computers for them.
I had at first thought the problem with the laptop was a virus, but as I looked into it, I am beginning to think it is hardware related: hard drive or ram being faulty. I have not finished with this yet.
The XPS starts up in Safe Mode. I suggested he go into msconfig and see what turning off some or all of the startup programs might do for him, or maybe checking for faulty RAM (he has 24G!) I am just a newbie, and off hand don't know of any issues Windows or hardware may be running into with the DDR3 ram, or the 3 hard drives, etc. the customer may be seeing, but I would hope that Dell knew what they were doing in configuring this pc and making it stable. He is going to try a few more things, and then again, may bring it in for us to test.
A coworker also had a call today from a Dell customer who needed help with his computer still under warranty...
I have heard some good things about Dell computers lately as far as price and performance. But the chance it seems you take, is that if there is a problem, there is very little help from Dell for you....
Showing posts with label computer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label computer. Show all posts
Saturday, May 9, 2009
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Hard Drive Upgrade and Cloning
Time had come to retire my secondhand hdd. It was filling up quickly, with precious little room to spare. I chose a cheap Seagate 7200.10 w/ 250G of space to replace the little fella. I also wanted to clone my old disk to the new one. The whole pc is aging, but I want to get a little more use out of it before I try my hand at another build.....
I had never replaced a hard drive with a cloned new one before, so I began the adventure.
First, my new $55 (w/ free shipping from NewEgg) hd was OEM - just the drive. That was okay, I knew I had a SATA cable somewhere, and a baggie of screws. I had heard about Norton Ghost and some other cloning utilities. Well, as you may already have noticed, I am rather a cheapskate (thank my german heritage). I was not about to pay more than a couple of dollars for software, and didn't want to wait. But - AHA! Seagate has a utility on its website called DiskWizard, a free hdd utility that also does cloning, based on Acronis, a respected software program.
Here goes.
1. Downloaded DiskWizard to old hard drive.
2. Installed SATA hard drive. Stupid screw holes did not line up, and a little bending was in order. Found the power connector for the SATA drive, and connected it, and connected the SATA cable to the disk and the m/b. Too bad m/b only supports SATA 1. (mk8-939 Mach Speed Viper)
3. Case closed, boot up. Hmm- where is my new drive??
4. I found that I had to go to rt click on My Computer >Manage >Disk Management. There it is!
Right click on the box for the new hd and initialize.
5. Another right click, this time in the box showing the new drive space, and select new partition, primary, and use others as default (tho I did change volume name to something more descriptive). Aaand.. it worked! I made the drive active here.
6. A quick check shows my new drive, (as 'E') and I can write and read to it!
Rebooted here just for the heck of it.
7. Clonage begins! Running DiskWizard. At this point I see I could probably have used DiscWizard to install the new hd. Either way, we are good here. I continue on to cloning tool, and follow the steps.
8. Another reboot :) DiskWizard does its magic. Be patient.
9. Success! And the screen requests to press any button to close down.
10. On my next reboot I del into the bios, and make the new, bigger, better hard drive the one I want to boot from (after the CD drive), and bravely go on...
11. Woohoo! Magic happened! I am now working on the new Seagate drive, and the change so far, seems to be ah... seamless.... It is now the C drive, and my old drive has become the E drive.
This was much easier than I had anticpated. I love when that happens :)
12. It remains to be seen how I would use the other drive. I guess I will save it as backup for a while... Will windows question my upgrade? Would I be able to just put the old hd in another pc and access my programs as well as my files? These questions will be answered in time I suppose. For now, my time has to be spent elsewhere.
I had never replaced a hard drive with a cloned new one before, so I began the adventure.
First, my new $55 (w/ free shipping from NewEgg) hd was OEM - just the drive. That was okay, I knew I had a SATA cable somewhere, and a baggie of screws. I had heard about Norton Ghost and some other cloning utilities. Well, as you may already have noticed, I am rather a cheapskate (thank my german heritage). I was not about to pay more than a couple of dollars for software, and didn't want to wait. But - AHA! Seagate has a utility on its website called DiskWizard, a free hdd utility that also does cloning, based on Acronis, a respected software program.
Here goes.
1. Downloaded DiskWizard to old hard drive.
2. Installed SATA hard drive. Stupid screw holes did not line up, and a little bending was in order. Found the power connector for the SATA drive, and connected it, and connected the SATA cable to the disk and the m/b. Too bad m/b only supports SATA 1. (mk8-939 Mach Speed Viper)
3. Case closed, boot up. Hmm- where is my new drive??
4. I found that I had to go to rt click on My Computer >Manage >Disk Management. There it is!
Right click on the box for the new hd and initialize.
5. Another right click, this time in the box showing the new drive space, and select new partition, primary, and use others as default (tho I did change volume name to something more descriptive). Aaand.. it worked! I made the drive active here.
6. A quick check shows my new drive, (as 'E') and I can write and read to it!
Rebooted here just for the heck of it.
7. Clonage begins! Running DiskWizard. At this point I see I could probably have used DiscWizard to install the new hd. Either way, we are good here. I continue on to cloning tool, and follow the steps.
8. Another reboot :) DiskWizard does its magic. Be patient.
9. Success! And the screen requests to press any button to close down.
10. On my next reboot I del into the bios, and make the new, bigger, better hard drive the one I want to boot from (after the CD drive), and bravely go on...
11. Woohoo! Magic happened! I am now working on the new Seagate drive, and the change so far, seems to be ah... seamless.... It is now the C drive, and my old drive has become the E drive.
This was much easier than I had anticpated. I love when that happens :)
12. It remains to be seen how I would use the other drive. I guess I will save it as backup for a while... Will windows question my upgrade? Would I be able to just put the old hd in another pc and access my programs as well as my files? These questions will be answered in time I suppose. For now, my time has to be spent elsewhere.
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