Tuesday, February 14, 2006

Notebook Transplant

My Dell notebook is still on the critical list. I'm pretty sure the motherboard is cracked back by the power jack. I can run it for a little while - on battery power only - and I have to be careful to keep the motherboard stable.

Not a good set-up for backing the data off the thing!

Fortunately, today I was able to take my hard drive out of my notebook, and stick it in another same-model notebook. This same-model notebook started up just fine with my hard drive in it, and I was able to back up my data to a USB hard drive.

One program noticed the transplant activity and complained. That was Norton Antivirus. It wanted to be reactivated across the internet or else it was going to refuse to work at all. So I turned it off for the duration of the transplant. Presumably this was some kind of anti-piracy feature.

One trouble with piracy is that it leads to all these pain-in-the-behind anti-piracy features!

The pirates are singing and drinking rum,
While I'm coping with features that leave me numb.

No comments: