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Vance Hunt
has provided home-user help desk style support for his consulting company for over 6 years. Making his home in beautiful Southern California, Vance provides general computer Q&A for users via his weekly column.
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 | Friday, January 12, 2007 |
| You too can refurbish your own hardware. |
| By Vance Hunt |
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My external USB drive died. Real sudden like, totally dead. Fortunately, it didn't have critical data I cant get elsewhere. Instead of throwing it away, can I just replace the internal drive myself?
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If the device is past the manufacturer's warranty, then they are not going to
provide any replacement or general support anyway, so the unit is pretty much
yours to tinker with as you see fit. If it is still under warranty, any tampering will instantly void the warranty and eliminate any chance of the vendor assisting you.
 The
external drives I have seen are pretty easy to open up, released with just a few
screws. What you will find inside is either an
EIDE or
SATA
internal hard drive, and even if you're not that into computer innards, you can
see that there is only the two connections; power and data. There are
probably a few screws holding the drive to the case which will be easy to
remove, and once those are out, you can "unplug" the drive to complete the
removal.
Step two is to look at the drive information, such as the size, type, etc.
Purchase another hard drive that is the same type (SATA, EIDE, ATA, etc) and a
size you desire, ensure the new drive has the same jumper settings as the one
you remove (for Master / Slave / Cable Select - information will typically be
printed on the label as to how to make the setting, and the drive itself will
have the jumper set), and replace it. The new drive can be a different
size; the holder doesn't set a limit. Once you've installed the new drive,
put the case back together.
On your first reconnect to back to your computer, you will most likely need
to format / initialize the drive (all depending on your OS), but once you have,
your refurbished drive should function as expected.
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I just upgraded to Office 2007. I can't figure out how to put a Delivery point bar code on my envelopes from Word. Is this a hidden feature?
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Nope. Word 2007 has done away with both the Delivery point bar code
(POSTNET bar code) as well as the FIM-A courtesy reply-mail.
Official
documentation says: "Periodically, the United States Postal Service (USPS) changes the way it calculates postal bar codes. When this happens, bulk mail that uses the bar codes generated by Word may not be accepted by the USPS. To avoid providing bar codes that may become obsolete, Microsoft has removed this feature from Office Word 2007."
They also go on to mention that you can purchase a third-party provider from
their Microsoft Office Marketplace. I think we can all read between the
lines there.
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