Welcome to My World

I am pleased to report the Dead Hardware Parade has come to an end with the arrival of a replacement (and functional) 500GB Western Digital disk. My desktop now has two 750GB disks in it, with the 500GB disk attached externally, for a total of a whopping 2TB of storage space! Woohoo! Naturally this fails to impress any real geek who works in a data center with attached storage devices (these days a single hardware RAID5 enclosure with just 12 disks could push past the 1 petabyte range), but it makes me happy

Some kudos are in order for the people involved in this:

• Canon gets major marks for (very quickly) replacing my PowerShot A570 IS when it acted up in February. Not only did they send me a new camera to replace it, but they seem to have loaded it with newer firmware (I don’t have the old camera anymore so I can’t actually check ), since the little bugger feels faster and is definitely taking better pictures than the old one was.
• Seagate and Western Digital both score high marks for quickly (and without a fuss) replacing the bad hard drives I sent to them. They could have scored higher by paying for shipping both ways, but “customer pays to send to us, we pay to send it back” is fairly standard practice in this industry, so no biggie.
• HP gets a begrudging “thanks” for finally sending a replacement power supply for my notebook free of charge. It is clear they use offshore tech support personnel, as there is a very frustrating communication barrier when dealing with their support group. It took several e-mail exchanges over the course of three weeks to finally get them to actually send the right replacement part; initially they wanted me to ship the whole notebook in.

All told, it took two months to get everything fixed (replaced, really), but it is done. Huzzah!