This post is more for my advanced customers as well as all the competitors that scour my website for any news or information they can get on me. I figure that the more people that know of this up-coming change, the better it’ll be for everyone involved. Some information is best shared…

Hard drives are changing to a new format called Advanced Format. This means that the sector size of 512 bytes is going away. The new sector size will be 4KB (4096 bytes) to take advantage of several things. While the drives are not out yet, they’re coming.

The bad news: Windows XP will be thrown out the door since it will have serious performance issues with the new standard. This means that if you’re using, or recomending XP, it will now be officially limited on hardware, not just on support and age.

For those that just went cross eyed, I do apologize. Occasionally, technobable is a requirement. To put it in perspective, unlike the shrinking parking spaces across the world, the “parking spaces” on your hard drive will get bigger. The “lot” (aka: Hard Drive) will still be the same size and hold the same amount of information. It’s just a better use of space.

If you’d like to get into the details of how this works, feel free to see the original article.
Justin

I had a customer this evening, in Portland, that had called a Craigslist technician to repair his computer. Supposedly the technician found a bad hard drive and offered to replace it with a $120 “used” hard drive since new hard drives cost hundreds of dollars (NOT TRUE!). The customer gratefully agreed and ended up allowing the installation of the used drive. For an hours time, plus the used drive, the customer ended up paying $140.

Damaged Hard Drive From a Craigslist Technician (click it for the bigger version)

The drive worked for about a week until the customer needed to move out of his apartment into another apartment. This caused a general rumbling in the case, if you’re not careful. Well, this caused enough of a rumble to cause the hard drive to fail. The customer decided to call a company rather than a Craigslist technician and I present you with the picture here…

This doesn’t look like much, except a broken tab, but look closely (ok, click on the picture for a bigger version)… Notice the white grooves on the tab? Those shouldn’t be there. Neither should the discoloration under the smaller grouping of attachment points…

I give you… Superglue ladies and gentlemen. This technician sold a poor customer a 70GB hard drive that was superglued for enough money to allow the technician to buy a 1TB hard drive for himself. That’s a REALLY big drive, a full 730GB bigger than what he billed the customer for.

Fortunately, I managed to get the data off the drive and replace the drive with a larger one for the customer. In the end, the customer paid about $145 for everything I did, with a much bigger drive.

Some signs to watch for: The technician never had an anti-static bag to carry the drive in. These bags protect electronic components from damage due to static electricity. The customer never saw a price tag, but he only had seen the $20 per hour cost on the Craigslist ad. Worst of all, the cell phone number has been disconnected and the customer paid in cash – no way to trace the guy.

Please be careful when working with any type of technician. Protocol16 would love to have your business, but even if you don’t choose us, we always recommend that you ensure that your technician is Licensed, Bonded & Insured (we carry a card from our insurance company), has a permanent number on something – a business card, a car wrap, a phone book entry, etc, uses protective covers on electronics, and you see price tags on the merchandise that shows up with the tech.

Personally, I carry around a case that we call “The Football” (it’s a presidential joke) that has several hard drives in fully wrapped packages, with price tags attached, all in a fully padded case. In this situation, I showed up and opened the case and the first thing the customer said was “The last guy didn’t do anything like that, he had it loose in his backpack!”

While we do sometimes provide used parts for customers, in extreme situations, they are always quality controlled to ensure that this type of thing doesn’t end up in customer hands. Again, when calling on any company for any type of computer repair, please be careful.
Justin

It’s no secret that all business owners do research on each other. While researching a competitor today, I noticed something pretty bad: Fake Reviews on Google. There is one company here in Portland that is blatantly creating fake reviews to boost their business. The sad part is, someone else caught this not too long ago as well and submitted their own negative reviews right back.

While I would love for you to choose Protocol16 as your computer repair shop in Portland, I just ask that you do your research so you don’t fall victim to something that could cause more problems for you.
Justin

Microsoft has released some rather important information late last week. Since Oregon is slowing down during recession and a lot of people in Portland are going back to school, I figured I better cover this for everyone.

As the title says, Microsoft has decided to release Windows 7 to college students for a mere $30. If you’re interested, feel free to visit where I got the information from.

We are currently testing Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2, which is based off of Windos 7 and, so far, we love what we see. As always, if you have any questions, please feel free to give us a call and ask!
Justin