Don’t drop your laptop.
I suppose that ought to be obvious. I used to be jealous of those people with laptops that had shock sensors because they could play games, pretend to have a lightsaber, and all sorts of gadgetry with their accelerometer equipped laptop.
Now I’m jealous of those people because their laptops probably would have faired better. The good news is that only the hard drive was damaged, and not even fatally. The bad news is that I do need replace it and my laptop isn’t really designed to have a replaceable hard drive.
I used to work as a computer support guy in my college dorm, but I always refused to take a laptop apart. I was never quite sure that I could put it back together. I’ve built desktops and servers many times, but they’re not the expensive puzzlebox of a smal laptop.
And I have nothing but good things to say about GNU ddrescue. It’s not for many mortals, but you should definitely recommend it to your friendly neighboorhood CS geek if you have serious hard drive problems.
Posted by M as Deep thoughts, Computers at 9:48 AM EDT
