shanenin

Good question. I was going to mention that in my last post. Are you sure he took the caddy also? You definitely need it. The caddy makes the harddrive fit securely. Most laptops also use a proprietary connector that bridges the laptop ide pins to the motherboard. I am not sure about the model you have. I will see if I can find anything online.

Western digital makes a good hardrive, of the two I linked to, I think I would go with the WD. As to switching them out, you may have to set the jumper on the drive from CS to Master or visa versa. Try it the way it comes to you, if it is not detected in the bios change the jumper. I don't foresee any problems, but it is a computer, who knows :-)

First off, if this is also the same partition as his OS, don't use the drive until his data is recovered. His OS could permaently delete the data if the same spot on the hardrive is written to You did not leave any information on how it got deleted. If he just formatted it, the data should be fairly easy to get. I like this program. It will let you try it for free, if it finds the files you want, you can then pay for it, that is needed to save them. It is not inexpensive, it costs $69.99.

any standard 2.5 inch ide(not sata) laptop drive should work. The only thing I am not sure about is some of the safety features of thinkpads. They have a bios level password for the harddrive, I don't think that is a factor, but I am not sure. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16822136130 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16822152032

Thanks guys.

Do any of you guys use cell phones(or other portable devices) to surf the web? Is it possible to use google calendar on these phones(or is it to hard to read)?

Cool. I sent that link to my daughter.

Thanks, for the support. You better behave or I will take away your computer privileges(thats what I tell me kids; actually as of this morning, they lost them for the day)

I think you misread it. I told her I would have to STILL CHARGE for the part. Your correct, it can be a big pain to return stuff. Most of my laptop parts are ordered on ebay, and I won't even try and return them unless I know the are bad.

As to her fee, I will be honest and tell her the real reason it failed, but she is still getting charged the price I quoted her for the inverter replacement. Most of the price of the job was for labor, and that was actually higher then planned, since I took it apart twice. You got me thinking about that button. On my inspiron 1501 I can't see it. I dug a little for it, it is under the right hinge cover.

I thought I would post some content today. This may help somebody. I got a job repairing a dim lcd on an Acer Aspire 5000. This is one job I hate to take. A dim screen can be caused by multiple things, to name a few: bad mother board, bad power inverter, bad LCD panel(contains the bulb), bad video cable, among others. The crappy part is none of these parts can be tested(in practice). Most people are not happy with spending money if it does not fix the problem :-) I don't feel comfortable charging people if I am not able to fix it. I told my client we could try a new power inverter, this is pr

You should only flash your bios if it is really needed(fix a particular issue), as Mark stated, if it goes wrong, you can destroy your mother board.

it is not the preferred way to shutdown, but if your computer locks up it is the only thing you can do. You have no other choice then to just hold in the button and shut it down hard.

sp3 will be great. The first thing I will do will make a slipsteamed copy of XP to do installs at my shop. I am assuming IE7 will be included with it. That is good also. It is a pain to have to manually install it every time.

By default the router and modem should just communicate together without any effort on your part. While plugged into the router, what does the the command ipconfig /all show

no problem :-)

You should probably start a new post with the log in this section of the forum. You will get a more proper response.

The biohazard is indicative of a smitfraud infection, check out this site. As Matt mentioned, posting a complete log in the right forum will be the best bet to cleaning out your computer. You may have multiple infections, also Smitfraudfix does not always completely get all of the infection. You mentioned the recovery partition, what is the model of the computer, I could probably tell you what key combination you need to restore your computer. In this case, you probably do not need to reformat. In the future you may need to do a full recovery.

As previous posters said, the main(only) thing you can do is to add memory. You can get a gigabyte for about $40.

Thanks for the update, Glad you got it figured out. I think your correct, since your settings got changed to ide mode, their is know way to read striped harddrives. That was a tough one to figure out, who would have thought your bios settings would have reverted to ide mode, that is odd. Just curious was this a custom build? I also am running vista on two striped drives. It needs all the help it can get :-)

yup, thats my wife. I think the pictures in the site need to be changed. She needs to have a finished haircut picture. Somebody else did the site, I am going to hack it(with her permission) and add this picture, and shift things around a bit.

here is a shameless link to my wifes website , http://itsyourhair.net

that is a tough one. It could be a bad chipset on the mobo. As to testing the hardrive, most of the manufactures have utilities that will run from a cd. Take a look at your hardrive and then goto the manufactures website and download their testing utility.

It is probably not the hardrive, but it is worth testing, just to rule it out. Hardrives can fail within the first year often.

Maybe a bad hardrive.