Friday, November 17, 2006
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Course recordings policy followup with Kevin. Chatted with Melissa. Computer maintenance for Joel. Chatted with Susie. Chatted with my sister. Pathway declaration page updates for Cindy. Iomega REV drive troubleshooting, spent a long time in online chat talking with Tracy at Iomega about Answer ID 16274—the light on the eject button blinks on and off at slow intervals and the disk won't eject. Tracy suggested that I power down the computer, remove only the IDE cable, power on the computer, then press the eject button. Since the computer was our server I was unable to do it at that time, so I waited until after 5 PM to do it. This was unsuccessful. Tracy suggested that if that didn't work I should power down the computer, unplug all cables to the REV drive (both power and IDE), then insert an extended paper clip into the emergency eject hole on the REV drive. After several attempts, this worked, but the disk came out only about 1 inch. It took a great deal more of gentle force to get the disk out, and afterwards I could see inside the REV drive an arm with a disk head that was obviously now so bent that this drive was no longer functional. The drive cost us about $400 and had only a 1-year warranty and lasted us 2 years. We have another $400 or so invested in REV disks, but I am really uncertain about sticking with REV at this point. Iomega charged us $30 for the online chat session which in my opinion is unfair because why couldn't the information Tracy gave me have been provided in Answer ID 16274 which is available for free? I believe my problem didn't really need a live technician, so my perception is that Iomega makes more money by not keeping their support documents up to date (even if that isn't really the case). Or, you could argue that they make more money by creating poor quality hardware or intentionally providing short warranties with an option to pay extra for a longer warranty for the same product. Our needs don't really require an unlimited supply of data storage (REV disks) so I think I'll use a pair of large (160+ GB) 2.5-inch external USB hard drives which can also fit in our document safe or go to offsite storage. The warranty will be either the same or better than a REV drive and will cost less, and even if one fails at least I'll still have a way to continue backups while one drive is out for service—can't do that when you have only one REV drive. I'll need to reconfigure how Outlook data gets backed up since some of our staff save essentially every e-mail message which creates 2- or 3-GB daily-changing PST files, attachments and all. Lunch: Panda Express. My fortune: The evening will bring romance. Dinner at home with Patrick: steamed carrots, wild rice, and Patrick's special recipe of homemade breaded and fried chicken fingers. Watched old TV.