ASUS Eee - deal you may know of

Madison Kelly linux-5ZoueyuiTZhBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org
Wed Nov 26 19:02:58 UTC 2008


Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 10:09:15AM -0500, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
>> Others have pointed out that hard drive replacement is easy (at least
>> for them) and not too expensive.  I would tend to agree, with caveats:
>>
>> (1) some people are more confident whacking on hardware than others,
>>
>> (2) some notebooks are really hard to upgrade (eg. my subnotebook
>> required a lot of disassembly just to get to the RAM).
> 
> I have had to remove the keyboard on a laptop to get at the ram.  Very
> stupid design (Thanks HP/Compaq consumer division).  I have not (yet)
> seen a laptop where the harddisk was hard to get at.  I suspect if I saw
> a Macbook Air I might have seen one (which also has no ethernet jack,
> which is just totally stupid).

Not to defend the Apple Air, but it does have a wired jack. It's on a 
hidden drop-down door on the righ-rear side.

To replace the hard drive on an iBook G4 took nearly 3h... Strike that, 
it was 3h to open the damn thing without special tools (if you cared 
about nor marring up the pretty white plastic). I *hate* working on iBooks!

>> Don't put off backing up your data: the life of a failing hard disk is
>> quite precarious.
> 
> If your data isn't backed up, then it isn't important.  Being a sysadmin
> in the past tought me that.  Much easier to deal with people's disk
> failures and such if that is your policy.  If someone complains that
> their floppy with their only copy of their document doesn't work, well
> then it wasn't an important document after all.

Though I agree with this view 100%, I don't think it's fair to impart 
this on non-geeks. Many people have an unrealistic view of computer 
reliability. Just yesterday I had a client, whose optical drive is 
failing, exclaim "That happens!?" when I told her.

What we need to do, as geeks, is better educate the non-geek population 
on the inherent lack of reliability and, thus, the need for frequent 
backups.

madi
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