Laptop woes…

I’ve been dying to set up a wireless network in my home - it will free me from my home office, give my wife a place to work when she’s working out of the house, and allow me to be closer to my son when I’m working. I have a decent laptop, an IBM Thinkpad i1200. It’s only a Celeron 533, archaic by today’s standards, but perfectly fine for what I need it for. I also have a 802.11b card and wireless access point my brother-in-law gave me after he upgraded his network. Thanks, Dave!

My hard disk died, so I ordered a replacement. I opened the new hard drive, took the adapter off of the old hard drive, put it on the new drive, and re-installed Windows 2000. After 7 days, the new drive failed. I packed it up, sent it back, and found out they were back-ordered from the original supplier, so I figured I’d order from elsewhere.

Quick observers will notice that I didn’t mention that I removed the adapter from the drive before sending it back.

I ordered a replacement from a company I have ordered from many times on 8/11. It showed in stock, and I should see it in 5-7 days. It showed up on 8/29. I opened the new drive, and realized that the adapter is sitting on the old drive. So, now I spend 30 minutes on IBM’s site, give up, call IBM, spend 20 minutes on hold, get to a person and we both sift through part numbers. After 20 more minutes, we find a plastic adapter the size of a couple of matchsticks that’s nothing more than a block of plastic with electrical contacts on it - for $25.00. Ground shipping is only $13.00.

$38.00 plus tax for a chunk of plastic that serves no purpose other than to make the drive bay multi-use. I hate hardware.