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Surgery complete!
I managed to replace the hard drive in my PowerBook with a Hitatchi Travelstar 7200 RPM, 80 GB drive. The instructions from www.pbfixit.com were excellent as well as their screw guide which I used to dutifully place and tape all the screws I removed. The drive is now formatted and appears to work. I still have to wait until tomorrow morning to get my backup and restore it. I completely understand the warning "no user serviceable parts inside". Replacing a hard drive in a laptop takes time and patience.
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Fry's - The good, the bad, and the ugly
As I had some time to kill today, I decided to go ahead and get a new hard drive for my PowerBook and replace it without waiting until tomorrow. The choices on a Sunday for getting a laptop hard drive are pretty limited, basically only Fry's Electronics. Fry's is not my favorite store as their service is not great, return lines are long, and sometimes they try to pass returns off as new (I had bought a monitor from them that turns out had been used and when it broke, it was out of warranty even though it was less than 1 year since I had bought it). However, on the plus side, Fry's has decent store hours, good selection, OK prices, and carries parts others don't (where can you find a #6 Torx screwdriver locally?). While I try to avoid shopping at Fry's, sometimes it is unavoidable.
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Hard drive failure
One of the worst things that could happen to a computer happened today to me. The hard drive on my PowerBook failed. It started making funny noises yesterday and then today it stopped spinning. Given that I'm a bit paranoid about backups, I said to myself, "this isn't a problem as my backup is 2 hours old." Then my elated thought turned to disappointment when I realized that my 2 hour old backup is sitting in the bank vault where I had just been a few hours earlier to store my backup. The good news is that my 9 day old backup boots my PowerBook thanks to SuperDuper!. So on Monday morning I'll drive over to The Chip Merchant, plunk down $150 + tax for a new 80 GB hard drive, then goto the bank which doesn't open until 9 am. Then I have the fun task of disassembling my PowerBook and putting the new hard drive in.
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Stuffit Archives and .hqx encoded files
Stuffit products have been on my Macs for years and have done a wonderful job of compressing and decompressing. Stuffit Expander shipped with all versions of the Mac up until OS X Tiger. Now that zip is built into the OS and even has extensions for keeping the Mac resource fork (newer applications don't use the resource fork anymore), I haven't been able to come up with a reason to keep Stuffit Expander around except to deal with files I download that are still in .sit and .hqx formats. I find that some companies are still putting files on their websites with these extensions; if the app doesn't have a resource fork, zip it. If it does or you want to customize the look, use a disc image (.dmg) and let a user download that. I think by now users are used to using disc images. Also, the disc image doesn't need to be zipped or .bin put on the end; just make sure your web server serves up the .dmg file as application/octet-stream.