A friend dropped their PC off today, to sort two issues…
First was easy enough, their portable (USB) hard drive required more juice than his motherboard/PSU could supply. Unfortunately, the drive didn’t come with a separate AC/DC power supply, although it sports a socket for such a transformer. Given the state of finding normal power/audio/video accessories over here, I’ve suggested an easier solution, but less expensive than grabbing a new PSU for the PC. I double checked, and as long as it is of the powered, rather than passive, variety, a new USB hub should solve the problem. Unusual for a USB hub to be the solution to a problem, rather than the cause, but there we go. This way, the USB is only used for data to/from the PC, the power is supplied completely separately by the hub itself.
Next we have a fun issue, where, seemingly at random, the windows GUI flips out and reverts to Windows 98 flat style. No particular software or activity seems to trigger it, so I finally got round to obtaining a Russian Windows XP disc, and will have a go at restoring explorer.exe and ntoskrnl.exe to their original states. If all else goes wrong, he hasn’t reinstalled XP since he got the PC, and some of his friends pride themselves on their l33t hacking & ‘virus’ writing skills, so I’m backing up his entire personal data collection over night (damn D-Link router runs @ 100MBit, not 1GBit, I’m now too lazy to disconnect and patch up direct one to one…) Also running anti virus scans on full depth once xfer is complete.
Had a nice meal and drink with him and his parents (friends with the in-laws), and introduced them to Angel Delight (Andy & KZBlog, you know your days are numbered :P). Already got Igor hooked up to Marmite…