Category: Computer bits

It’s been a few weeks and the new hard drive in the wife’s laptop still seems to be working fine. Did I mention hardware really drives me nuts sometimes?
So after putting the new hard drive into the wife’s laptop and having it not being recognized for some reason, I popped it into my work laptop where it worked just fine. Formatted and installed Windows, got it booting and software installed. Then I stuck the drive back into the wife’s laptop where by some strange circumstance, worked and booted up perfectly. Never could figure out why the drive wasn’t recognized the first time. Flaky connection? Bad connection? Who knows.
The old drive suddenly decided to work again once I had it in an external drive enclosure ($10 from Newegg.com). Why, I have no idea. It wouldn’t work in the wife’s laptop and wouldn’t work in mine either. All I did was stick it into the external enclosure, connect it to the USB port and presto, one 60 GB D: drive on the system. So thankfully, instead of having to lose all that data all the wife’s stuff was recoverable and copied onto the new drive.
Not sure what magic spells or incantations I stumbled on during the process (aside from a few curse words), but now I have a 60 GB external drive that I’ll be able to wipe clean and use as a potential backup device.

My work email is being deluged with a flurry of bogus bounced mails this morning. I’ve had 10 of them come through my inbox in the last 15 minutes, all of them with attachments.
Tip: If you get an email bounce (typically has the subject ‘Returned mail’ or ‘Unexpected delivery failure’, always check the From address. Generally authentic bounced mail only comes from the mail server that your outgoing mail goes through. If the From address in the email doesn’t look like one of the servers you configured your email client with, odds are it’s bogus and you probably shouldn’t open it. If the bounce also has an attachment, odds are even greater that it’s a bogus mail. None of the mail server software I’m familiar with send out bounced email notifications with attachments.
Consider for example my regular netcom.com email. My email client is configured to fetch mail from Earthlink’s POP server, , and send outgoing mail through their SMTP server. If I get a bounce that doesn’t come from a netcom.com or earthlink.net server, that’s an immediate red flag so it gets flagged as junk and into the bit bucket it goes.
These bogus bounced emails are no doubt an attempt to take advantage of most people’s general lack of knowledge about how email is ferried around. The ones I got today were particularly obvious because the From addresses weren’t even valid emails.
Keep an eye on your email and never blindly open anything with an attachment. Spam filters are getting better, but they’re still not foolproof.

My 256MB flash drive has stopped working. It was plugged into a knee-level USB port and I fear it may have gotten bumped while I was getting up out of the chair, causing a connection inside the flash drive to get broken. It’s not acknowledged by any computers I stick it into so I think it’s dead.
This is bad, because the most recent versions of the talk and paper I’m working on were on the flash drive. However, not fatal because I also have copies of everything scattered about on my desktop computers. So at best I’ve only lost a week’s worth of changes which were fairly minor and easily recreated.
There were several other things on the flash drive, but they were just copies of stuff already on my other computers and nothing critical.
Sucks to lose the stuff on the drive, but at least it’s only inconvenient rather than really bad.