This won’t be on the exam, but what is going on is I am using the motherboard of a working computer to recover the information off the crashed drive of this computer. The trick is to make an exact clone so that I don’t have to reinstall the operating system and all my applications. Of course, this only works when the good drive is going back in the same place as the bad one. It is a handy piece of work. For you techies, the C: drive is temporarily disconnected and the computer is running on DOS off a floppy. Wasn’t that fun?Tell you what, how about another equally thrilling picture of the software part of the event. You can hardly sit still, I can tell. Can you see the cartoon of the ghost on the screen? It is the brand name of the product I’m using, hence the term “ghosting” the drive. I know of nothing better for this work than this ancient product by Symantec. Still, make sure you know what you’re doing because most of you don’t, trust me.
It was an amazingly productive day, since all the senior staff was in for a few hours. We are the only computer shop in the area that covers all the bases, so people tend to target Saturday mornings to drop in. Between customers is when the real horsepower of experience takes over. My part is usually finding obscure drivers which others seem to have less luck with. I learned how to cram my computers full of games so they might sell a little quicker.I’m still looking at what is available for the average Joe to do some of the computer basics himself. So I drove to the Barn after finding the Thrift closed for the afternoon. One of the series I used to like, the “For Dummies” has really suffered some bad authorship over the past ten years. Everybody jumped on that bandwagon, reminds of that English company that once offered a book of blank maps, with instructions. I could not find a single book that just tells a newbie how to, step by step, burn a CD.
So I looked at the wireless networking volume by said company. What a crock. It is two hundred pages long and contains such swill as the operating frequencies of Netgear channels 2 through 11. It is clear to be a “For Dummies” writer, you just somehow have to fill up at least 200 pages. Who knows, maybe buried deep in those chapters are the ten pages of information you are seeking.
After further analysis of Leo’s computer, I’d say he has a major virus attack, but I don’t know which one. His hard drive had over 472,000 files (80,000 – 120,000 is normal for an eight-year old computer), the most I’ve ever seen He is definitely looking to open a factory in Jupiter, north of West Palm Beach, Florida. That means I better learn how to hook up client-server networks since he’ll want me on the job.
