Hard drives and fast internet

Yesterday I got to replace a hard drive in a laptop. Dr. Jana’s laptop wasn’t working right for her, so I got to check it out yesterday. When I first started it up, it said that it couldn’t find the hard drive, and there was a nasty clunking sound coming from the hard drive region. So, I quick ran to San Salvador, bought a new 160gb hard drive, replaced it, and had Windows XP installed again before 8pm. I also got an external enclosure that I put the old hard drive in to see what all I could get off of it. So far its still been working, and so nothing has been lost.

This evening I felt like taking pictures of something, so I got out an old hard drive (since I was thinking about hard drives) which I use as a paperweight, and I messed around with it for awhile.

Our internet is now about twice as fast as what it was a week ago. The reason for the speed increase is that I was able to connect our ZTE MF622 3G/EDGE modem directly to an external antenna. Using this modem which is optimized for data transfers works much better than using an old phone. There is a connector on the modem for an external antenna, so I looked on the internet for awhile to try to figure out if there was an adapter for an external antenna that would work for it. The only thing I found that I thought might work was from a company in England, so I bought it and had it shipped here. Last week it finally got here, but when I tried it out, I couldn’t get it to work. $50 down the drain. That’s when I started looking a bit closer at the connector. I finally realized that hey, it might work with the adapter that we were already using from before for the phone. So I tried it. It was a tight fit, but it worked, and now it gets great signal. I went just now and checked its status, and its been connected for the past 39 hours, and has downloaded 620 megabytes. Before with the phone we were lucky to make it 8 hours before it would disconnect.

Here’s a view of the backside with the antenna connection. BTW here is a link to the adapter that we use.

On another subject. Yesterday when I was coming back from San Salvador after buying the hard drive, I got behind a car, and noticed that it had a motorcycle inside it.

Today I spent pretty much all day grading tests. I graded about 340 of them, more or less. I was extremely tired of grading tests by the time I got done.

I’m heading to bed now. I’m tired. I worked today, had a late night last night, and will have a long day tomorrow.

– Aaron

~ by Aaron on March 4, 2009.