Dell inkjet scam

Not exactly related to my topic here, but it pisses me off nevertheless. I understand that companies like Dell will toss you a free inkjet printer to get you hooked on the consumables, but here's something especially nasty: two different prices for the same cartridge, depending on which printer it's supplying. Manufacturer Part# 10N0500 goes for CDN$36.00 if you are buying it for the Dell All-in-One Printer A920, but if you're fool enough to own a Dell 720 Printer, it'll cost you CDN$40.00.

I wonder if Dell includes a "loser" sticker in the 720's carton, to be affixed to your forehead while you're unpacking it.

You can buy a remanufactured cart in Canada from Staples. It'll work in either printer.

Backup...if you can

NTBackup on a server. Tape is full. Eject and insert brand new fresh out-of-the-package tape. NTBackup says it's unformatted; do you want to format it? Of course! Click "Yes". Message screen disappears. Window still says waiting for new media. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Eject media. Re-insert media. Nothing. It's taken almost ten hours so far; I don't want to blow this backup and have to start over. Idea! Stop and start Removable Storage service. Then:

The requested media failed to mount. The operation was aborted.
The operation was ended.
Backup completed on 3/1/2006 at 10:36 AM.
Directories: 3696
Files: 24976
Bytes: 18,250,089,521
Time: 9 hours, 48 minutes, and 41 seconds

Trying to Recover

Hot computer (3.2 Ghz P4) with a SATA RAID controller hangs on boot. Nothing gets it going so I try to reinstall from the Windows XP CD.

First of all, if you have a non-standard controller you must install additional drivers while Windows XP installer is starting up; you have to hit F6 early in the process (too bad if you miss your five second window--start over!). I've discovered you shouldn't insert your driver disk in the floppy drive while the installer is loading if you have more than one driver to install, because when you are (finally) asked to install the floppies, only the one that was sitting in the drive will be recognized. You press "S" as requested for additional drivers and the system will idiotically keep looking for the drivers on the first disk only. Start over!

(Another question: why does it have to take so unbearably long to install Windows, even on a fast computer, even if nothing goes wrong? I see Macs installing OS X in a fraction of the time.)

After all that, Windows installer still hangs at the "Searching for previous versions of Microsoft Windows" screen. Did manage to install an ATA drive and put XP on that and recover contents of RAID Array...array virtual disk checks out okay with CHKDSK, too. But I am still unable to reinstall Windows, or even reformat the disk from the Windows installer.

That's trustworthy computing.