Wednesday 4 August 2004

The law of entropy: All things progress from order to chaos. Not least in a Chaos Node, I guess. (Screenshot from MS chat, back when they tried to make chat logs look like comics.)

Too few DVD burners

It was time to burn some DVDs again. My external harddisk, a Maxtor with USB connection, was almost full. Nominally it holds 250 GB, but the way we computer nerds count the gigabytes (1024x1024) it is more like 233GB when freshly formatted. Well, now there were a little over 2GB left, so it was definitely time to swap out some of the stuff that I don't look at normally.

I connected the Freecom DVD burner (which, contrary to its name, was not free, although it was fairly reasonably priced if memory serves). This burner has been troublesome from it was new. It used to trash more DVDs than it burned, and it took me a while to figure out why. Turns out it could only format the disks when it was cold. So you had to format the disk the first thing you did, then you could burn to it, but not format another until next day. (Or you could give it time to cool down, I guess.)

This time, however, it finally met its fate. As I connected stuff, the disk fell about 1 foot and died instantly.

I suppose technically you are not supposed to let them drop even that far, but it had been faulty from the day it arrived, and I bought it at the shop that cheated me out of a whole PC. (It did not connect properly to the Internet, despite all my other PCs doing so, and they claimed it was a problem with my phone line. I eventually gave it away to the daughter of a coworker.) So I had no qualms about handing it back to the shop.

This of course did not solve the problem of the overflowing hard disk. The next day I tried to address this problem. More insanity to follow.