Ok, time for an update… I ended up calling Dell and jumped through all their loops. They asked me to take out the HD, CD drive, modem, RAM and the battery on my laptop to see if I could get some or the pretty lights on the front to light up. No go, I told you guys, it’s ***ked. Before I felt weird taking apart my laptop and taking all the bits ‘n pieces, but now that I’ve had this problem so much in the last couple years, I feel like a pro.
Wanna know the fun part? As soon as I put the pieces back together, the laptop worked fine. ’scuse me? That’s right, the seems to be back to normal, I’m just counting the days until it starts screwing up again. So if it screws up in the next week or so, I already have a dispatch repair number, so I can just drop it off at the repair depot, no need to jump through hoops.
Also, now that it’s working properly, I was able to play with the external hard drive I picked up yesterday. The original play was to pick up a Maxtor OneTouch system, but decided it was cheaper to get a the bits and assemble it on my own. So I bought a ByTecc casing with a regular Maxtor 300GB HD, so what would have cost me $300 (plus tax) ended up only costing me $200 (plus tax). Saving money is good. Since I had to put the peices together, the dard drive wasn’t formatted and I didn’t know that until I discovered this entry, saved me from throwing something.
So now all my personal files (graphics, web stuff, photos, mp3s) and all been moved to that drive, so the computer will now only store program files and the off data file. All my media files (ie the larger files) will be stored on my new media drive. Another reason that I’m doing this is that my computer hasn’t had a proper software cleaning since I bought it (2.5 years ago) so it’s time to format it all and start from scratch. Should be a fun adventure… have you done it before? got any tips? I’ve already made a list of the programs I have and want to reinstall, anything else I should keep note of?