Hardware Problems

The girls at Thai Culture Publishing have been having a hard time lately, as one of their computers started acting strangely, constantly rebooting during the initial loading of Windows.

This is a sign of the Blaster worm, among other things, so I decided the best way to fix this would be to remove the drive, put it in an external box, and run a virus scan on it.

However, I am in Ottawa, Canada, not Bangkok. So I told Pad to go the next day and buy an external drive box for a 2.5" disk drive at Pantip or Fortunetown.

Next day, she told me via MSN Messenger video conference that she now had a box. Now the challenge became the removal of the drive from the laptop chassis.

Pad is not knowledgable about hardware, and her English comprehension is not 100% yet, having essentially taught herself English in the last 12 months or so. She has trouble understanding the difference between "in" and "on", for example. I told her to unplug the cables and power cord from the laptop, turn it upside down, and place it on the desk. Seemed like a simple enough command, but I was wrong.

She unplugged the cables and power cord, then picked up the laptop, and opened the top drawer of the desk.

"NO!" I yelled, and she closed the drawer and put the computer back on the desk.

"Pick up the laptop, turn it over, and put it ON the desk upside down."

She opened the top drawer again.

"No, Pad," I said, "ON the desk, not IN the desk."

Finally she understood, "Oh, OK, Doug, now I understan'," and she put the computer on the desk right side up.

"Now flip it upside down, Pad." And she did.

OK, first step accomplished.

Then I told her to look at the bottom of the laptop case, and look for the icon of the hard disk drive. These icons are impressed into the plastic, and there are five of them, for memory, CPU, hard drive, battery, and modem.

She said, "OK, I find it already." She then used a small screw driver and undid the Philips screw, then could not get the cover off. Her husband, Gen, came over to help, picked up another screwdriver and started removing the screws that hold the case together.

"NO!" I yelled, "Gen, yud! Yud!"

He stopped, and I told Pad not to let him undo any more screws, it was just the one for the hard disk cover that we wanted. So then they tried to pry the cover off, and suddenly it popped off, landing on the desk.

"OK, Doug, finiss."

Great, except I could see in the web cam video that this was the memory, not the hard drive. So I told her that, and said, "Put the cover back on and look for the icon of the hard drive."

It took 3 or 4 minutes to fit the cover back in ("Difficul', Doug") and screw it in. Finally she went looking for the hard drive icon.

"OK, Doug, I see it."

Once more attacking it with the small screwdriver, she undid the screw, and popped off the cover, and there was the CPU exposed. Sigh.

One more round and she found the hard drive.

To make a long story longer, she finally got the hard drive out and installed in the external disk box. While she was assembling the box, I asked her, "Sanuk, mai?" (Is this fun?)

"Chai, Doug, now I like boy."

Next day she took the laptop back to the office and the girls succeeded in installing Windows, which is quite difficult for people who can't read English all that well.

As a result of this episode, I have added a section to the Windows Stupidities site to tell people to uncheck the option for automatic restart on error. It's called My System Continuously Reboots, and is located near the bottom of the contents menu. Sphere: Related Content