8×10Gallery.com

Archive for November, 2009

Either I’m having really bad luck or Western Digital is making crap drives. Just before Halloween I bought a new 1TB drive to replace the 500GB that failed. If you recall I have two Western Digital 500GB drives that mirror each other with all my pictures stored on them. Since I can’t replace these files I needed to get my backup in place and dupes of all the files. Now that I have dupes of the files my other Western Digital 500GB has decided to call it quits. The drive is throwing delayed write errors and the Event Log looks like a stuck pig full of red event errors.

Now it’s not like the drive has been pleading for help for weeks and I’ve just turned a blind eye to the situation. The drive literally started throwing errors a few hours ago and now it’s unreadable by Windows. Plus, I got the drive in October 2007 so the damn thing is just barely past two years old. Additionally I haven’t been using that machine very much this past year so the drive quite literally has only a few hours of actual use on it.

To put it bluntly I’m f@$king furious with Western Digital right now. The odds of two drives failing that close together are astronomical, but yet they did. And I can only count my blessings for getting a new drive and copying the files over before the other piece of $hit failed tonight. I was right on the cusp of losing four years worth of digital photos. Every single picture I’ve taken is on those drives. I thought a mirror would be the most practical way of having a backup. In this case it actually did work, but the backup is only as good as the drives themselves and from where I sit Western Digital drives are pieces of junk and can’t be trusted.

Suffice it to say that is the last Western Digital drive I’m ever going to buy and I will never recommend one to anyone ever again. Had the drives been five or six years old with thousands of hours on them this might make sense. But they’re not. Two years old and minimum usage hardly explains what’s happened.

I’m running a check on the drive that Windows can still partially access, although I’m not sure why since I can’t trust the drive and won’t ever put anything important on it. They’re nothing more than fancy paperweights with pretty blue and green flashing buttons on them.

As I write this I’m copying my files to a non Western Digital drive so I will once again have two copies. I really can’t believe these two pieces of crap failed this close together. Maybe the internal drives are better, but I’m never getting a WD MyBook or another version ever again. Having a mirror of my images definitely saved me, but this goes to show you your backups are only as good as the drives they sit on.

Western Digital, you suck.

If you don’t already have a copy of PSP X2 then you absolutely have no excuse to get one now. Egad, they’re practically giving the thing away. I just got the Black Friday email and Corel is offering ALL their apps at a serious discount.

Corel Draw X4 – $160
Corel Paint Shop Pro X2 Ultimate – $30
Painter 11 – $160
Painter Essentials 4 – $20

But let us not forget the most powerful coupon code Corel offers. Even with these prices you can still use BONUS20 and get another 20% off. I just recently upgraded for a super low price but there is no doubt these prices are kick ass!

Corel Black Friday Sale:

I’m not that big a fan of Office 2007. In fact, 2007 is a rather bloated and slow bundle that really doesn’t seem to offer any more features than what 2003 did. It has a new UI but I can’t say I’m that big of a fan of it. As far as Word is concerned about the only thing they added was its ability to post to blogs (which really isn’t that good if you ask me). Excel is Excel and for 90% of us you won’t see a difference in the way it works. You might see a shortcut here and there, but you won’t fall out of your chair with excitement.

OneNote however got some really nice updates with moving tabs and copy/paste (which really should have been in the 2003 version). 2003 is a great version but 2007 seems like it’s more of a finished product. Of course I’m shocked at the install footprint of 400+ MB. How is it 2003 was about 120MB and this version is nearly four times the size? Now, there’s not four times worth of new features that’s for sure.

Well, Microsoft has finally seen that giving people beta versions to work with is a good idea and they’re offering up Office 2010 for download. I can’t run it at work since it won’t (yet again) run on Windows XP 64-bit. I’m considering installing it at home just because I want to see what OneNote has to offer. As far as I’m concerned you really can’t put more into Word. It’s reached feature saturation. All they seem to be doing now is trying to make it more web aware and PDF capable. That’s all fine and dandy, but as far as writing tools go, Word peaked with the 2003 version.

OneNote still has plenty of room to grow and quite honestly if they would put grammar checking into OneNote I would actually ditch Word.

I’m a little curious to see what Outlook has to offer, but considering its still such a hodgepodge of ideas thrown into that app, I doubt it will ever make sense. Or run correctly.

Download Office 2010 Beta