Page 10      Diablo Blue      October, 2000

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2. CD-R/RW [External] to a FireWire port. This was another snap installation and go. With this there was furnished an up date drivers for Windows 98, plus "Easy CD Creator," but I had already installed Adaptec Creator 4, so for me it was just hook up and go. They [Fantom Drives]. Also furnished a FireWire cable hook up, and power cable for 120 AC which is converted to DC current. This does not seem to be quite the no-brainer for Macintosh, though there was a warning this would not work with out installing the furnished disk program "Adaptec Toast 4.1". They also had a separate installation disk for software for the CD-R/RW.
3. Hard Drive Kit [External] to a FireWire port. This one took a while. For Macintosh I think it would be a lot easier installation, besides they furnished a Mac formatted CD. But I operate a Windows 98 PC, and there were no real instructions, or program for this set up despite the commercial that said they [Fantom Drive] now included programs for Windows 98 and 2000.
All of this kind of peeved me, but desperate determination to the rescue! I took this case apart, there goes my warranty. The kit contains a conventual hard drive, and a rectifier to get 120 AC to DC 5 and 10 volts, and an adapter circuit that makes the hard drive accessible to the FireWire port, which you can then cable to your computer.
I had a stripped down computer, but it still had a BX mother board, and a floppy drive. So I temporarily hooked up the hard drive and the computer, and it booted to where I could activate the fdisk program, so now I could partition the drive. There now was a question in my mind what form of partition, but I reasoned that this hard drive would be under the control of FireWire, and not under the control of the motherboard BIOS. I set it to primary active. Then I formatted the hard drive.
Now with nervous fingers I reassembled the box and hooked it up. Well, now came the boot up on my main computer… It worked, and I could breathe again.
My Evaluation comment, "Ain't Hi-Tech great -- when it works".

I was asked at the Advanced Users SIG to write up a couple of my favorable experiences with Corporate America. Besides there has to be a counter to Mr. Curmudgeon's accessional dialog in Big Blue.

I bought a printer made by HP [Hewlett Packard]. I was quite pleased with the performance, till one day the yellow cartridge went empty, so I put in a new cartridge. Next day the new cartridge is spent. This kind of shook me, since anew cartridge is thirty dollars plus. That got me on the phone, after I got the number from a fellow computer aficionado. After explaining my situation, the next thing the phone person said, that Fed-Ex would be at my place tomorrow noon. They were there early. They took my printer to a airport, where it was flown to Oregon for repairs, there also was a Fed-Ex tracking program, so you could know where your printer was. At the promised date Fed-Ex was banging on my door with my repaired printer. My total cost was Zero, except the effort of the phone call, I sure was glad that I had saved the original carton.

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