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Monday, November 15, 2004

Computer Rage
Thank God for the BBC. Without them there'd be very little humor in the world of technology (or maybe anywhere else). "Data can disappear as a result of natural disaster, system fault or computer virus, but human error, including 'computer rage', seems to be a growing problem," said Adrian Palmer, managing director of Ontrack Data Recovery. He went on to ouline a few episodes of Stupid Human Computer Tricks:

* One user put his hard drive in a freezer, after reading on the internet that this can fix malfunctioning hardware
* When tidying up his computer folders, one user inadvertently deleted the ones he meant to keep. He only realised he'd made the mistake after emptying the recycle bin and defragging the hard drive
* While a large office was being constructed, a steel beam fell on a laptop that contained the plans for the building.
* A female user placed her laptop on top of her car while getting in. Forgetting about the laptop, it slid off the roof and she then reversed straight over it as she set off.

What makes this humorous, although maybe not really, is that the BBC headline for this story was: "How to smash a home computer." What it turned out to be was a quasi-infomercial for Ontrack. There's nothing really wrong with that, but it's not a technology news story.

# Permalink Posted at 9:39 AM 5 comments Email this Link

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Actually, I don't see such a big problem with sticking the hard drive in the freezer (though believing that somehow freezing a hard disk will fix a problem is another story). However, popping a frozen hard disk out and plugging it in (before it has a chance to reach thermal equilibrium) doesn't sound like a Good Idea to me.

# posted by Karl Hallowell 1:19 PM

Little known fact... I was the manager of a CompuetrLand store back in the 80's and sold computers. Whne the second coming of the Apple /// arrived my customers still didn't trust it for all the temp problems the first version had. So I took one and stuffed it in my refrigerator for 2 days, took it out, plugged it in and ran it for two days to see whether or not there where any problems remaining. It worked well and I ended up using it for a few more years until I got CP/M on my TRS-80.

# posted by Bill 3:35 PM

As for the hard drive in the freezer thing, this is no myth. It works. Many times when a drive stops working because of age, it is because the needle's weight has slowly disaligned it. If you try to take the case off of the hard drive, they are made to not work again because of safety issues. So the best way to bend it back is -- put it in the freezer. It contracts the metal back to what it was when the thing was bought, and you can normally get another 8+ good hours out of it afterwards.

# posted by billygotee 11:25 AM

Sooooo.... what happens when the metal expands again as it returns to room temps? Not to mention heats up when you run it again.

# posted by Anonymous 1:32 PM

It will fail again... but that's not the point.

The point is to get a "dead" drive working for long enough to get the data you need off it.

# posted by Anonymous 10:41 AM

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