Here at work, 100% of the 3 notebook hard drive failures we’ve had over the last year are Toshiba drives.   This doesn’t mean they are poorly made, may just mean they are very, very poplular drives for notebook OEMs.

One was replaced under warranty with no issues.

One was out of warranty and I replaced it with a spare we had laying around.

The third I applied for and received an Warranty RMA on 7/23/2008.  I shipped it back a day or two later.

Its been a while, and we haven’t received the replacement unit, so I decided to check on the shipment, and make sure they at least recieved the unit before I called them for a status update / tracking number.  Sure enough, UPS has it showing that they received it on the 7/31/2008.

I gave the RMA hotline a call, and was quickly greeted by a customer service rep.  I gave him the RMA number, he confirmed that they received the unit, but informed me that they didn’t have any replacements in stock, but they were expecting a shipment from Japan next week.

8 weeks seems like a pretty long time to wait for a warranty replacement, don’t you think?

We’re growing.  And so we’re looking for an IT System Administrator.  If you or someone you know is interested, please contact me directly so I can snag a resume.

Thanks!

---

Pawn X-Change, a retail financial services company, is seeking an IT System Administrator. The primary job responsibility is to support IT operations at our 30 current retail locations. We are currently in growth mode and are rapidly expanding over the next 5+ years.

The position is based in Issaquah, WA and our production data center located in Bellevue. Our retail locations are mostly Western Washington, with 5 locations in Arizona. Your duties will be split between on-site field work and central management from corporate offices.

Requirements include the following:

• Experience in troubleshooting network, server, terminal and printer issues
• Experience in supporting users, including set up of PCs for new users
• Experience with PC Hardware, Thin Client / Terminal Hardware, Windows XP/Vista, Windows Server, IIS, Apache, VPN, Networking, Active Directory
• Experience supporting MS Office applications
• Strong knowledge of TCP/IP protocol, LAN switching and routing.
• Strong customer relations/communication skills
• Resourceful, dependable and self-motivated
• Ability to manage multiple projects in a fast moving environment
• Exposure/experience with Macintosh and Linux environment and server administration (environment is predominantly Windows)
• Additional experience: Basic Windows Scripting, Watchguard System Manager

Pawn X-Change offers:

• Group Medical, Dental, LTD, Life Insurance
• 401(k) with 50% match
• Generous employee discounts
• Friendly working environment with great people

Be sure to visit us at www.pawnxchange.com for more info about the company.

If you are qualified for this great position, please e-mail your resume and cover letter to itjobs@pawnxchange.com

Pawn X-Change is an equal opportunity employer and participates in E-Verify.

I started to care about the Real Estate industry and the anti-competitive practices when I wanted to develop web-based real-estate tools for developers.  I had been looking around at what was out there and found that the offerings from the brokers/agents were tough to use, and didn’t tie into the geographic components of the market well enough.  There were no maps, limited pictures, etc.  There wasn’t much else on the market at the time (probably around 2002), and I thought there would be huge consumer demand for good home-buying tools.

What I learned is that it was basically impossible.  The brokers/agents have a strangle-hold on the MLS (Multiple Listing Services) and wouldn’t allow anyone to access or syndicate the data–indeed if I partnered with a member agent they would face heavy fines for sharing the data with me.  I was forced to look at alternative and non-definitive data providers like newspapers, craigslist, which were spotty at best.  I read about a lot of similar stories from other like-minded individuals, discount brokers, FSBO (For Sale By Owner) groups and sellers all of which have butted heads against the industry, who despite supposedly a group of competing independent business acts as one cabal.  The industry as a whole fights anything that make shake up the status quo and encourage competition: discounted listing rates, FSBO listings on the MLS, independent websites, etc.  Despite lawsuits and government investigations, the industry had been able to stay just away from serious legal trouble for anti-competitive practices.

And this is all still true today.  There are some third party websites like Zillow, and the FSBO folks have been making progress, but still face stiffoposition from the real estate industry and MLS folks.

The Federal Trade Comission released a FANTASTIC report about the state of the industry, anti-competitive practices, some proposed solutions, etc.   Despite the dry nature of the content, it is very easy to read and aimed at the average homebuyer or consumer.  Very, very well done.

In any case the Justice Department finally took action and reached a settlement with the industry–hopefully it will shake things up a bit and make buying and selling a home a bit better for the consumer.

In my line of work I occasionally have to repair/restore various notebook computers. I recently had a Dell Inspiron E1505 dropped off at my desk which was having “Vista Issues”.

The machine wouldn’t shut down properly, and had various issues, even after applying updates, searching for spyware, etc. At some point someone had installed Vista Home Premium over the factory installed Vista Home Basic that came with the machine. I figured restoring it to factory defaults would probably be a step in the right direction, but I didn’t have the factory restore DVD (if indeed they even came with one). Luckily Dell has a restore partition that includes the factory image.

Normally, to access this restore partition and re-image the computer, you’d reboot the machine and press CTRL-F11 as it is booting into Windows. Unfortunately, when you install a new OS over the top of the Dell-tweaked one, you lose this functionality. So how do you restore the factory image if you don’t have the factory image installed anymore?

On the D: partition, there is an image file in D:\Dell\Image\ falled “factory.wim“. This is the factory image. In D:\tools\ is the necessary Microsoft imagex.exe utility needed to restore the image.

So basically boot up the system into a command line, either using a Vista disk, or even a Windows 98 Boot CD/disk.

Run the following command:

d:\tools\imagex /apply d:\dell\image\factory.wim 1 c:

The “1″ argument represents the “image number” in the .wim file.

If it is working you’ll see the following

X:\>d:\tools\imagex /apply d:\dell\image\factory.wim 1 c:
ImageX Tool for Windows
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp. 1981-2005. All rights reserved.

Progress: 0%

It will take perhaps 5 minutes for the progress meter to start working–are you suprised? When was the last time Microsoft gave us a linear progress indicator? I’m just happy it didn’t go backwards. In all the process took around 20 minutes.

The full imagex syntax for imagex with the /apply flag is:

imagex /apply image_file image_number image_name image_path {/check | /ref | /scroll | /verify}

In recent weeks there have been two similar scenarios in which a company has attempted to stiffle or cover-up information that is on the internet by threatening/taking legal action, pulling domains and/or hosting services of certain websites.

This seems like a reasonable course of action, but the issue is that even if the legal arguments win–the cat is already out of the bag.  The information is cached, blogged about, and indeed covered in the media.  When one threatens legal action against a site, all you’re going to do is draw more attention to what you’re trying to cover up.

First example:  Wikileaks, a site where whistleblowers can anonymously post confidential documents, received documents alleging money laundering, asset hiding and tax evasion practices by Bank Julius Baer.   When Bank Julius Baer went after Dynadot, Wikileaks’ domain registrar, pulling the wikileak.org domain, it drew intense scrutiny.  Frankly before all this happened I’d never heard of Wikileaks or Bank Julius Baer, and never would have if they hadn’t draw so much attention to themselves with the legal action.  If they’d have done nothing, nobody would have ever heard about the scandal, but now, regardless of if the allegations were true, when anyone thinks of Bank Julis Baer, they will think “money laundering off-shore bank”.

A similar thing happened with a site called Howard Forums.  A user posted a link to an unprotected XML file on the servers of MobiTV (a mobile streaming video provider), which listed the company’s unprotected streaming QuickTime URLs that enable anyone on the internet to watch TV for free (albiet in low resoultion form designed for cell phones).  Rather than implement security methods that would prevent this from happening, they decided to threaten legal action against the owners of the site under the DMCA. What ended up happening though, is that by threatening the site, they ended up stirring up a hornet’s nest of interest from bloggers, forum members, and news site.  Now the information that they are trying to cover up is available from hundreds of different sources.  I’d never heard of Hardware Forums or MobiTV before but now I know how to get free TV on my mobile phone or computer.

The bottom line is that the Internet is about information–and once it is out, its out.  There is nothing you can do to put the cat back in the bag.  By attempting to do so, all you’re going to do is draw more attention to the thing you’re trying to hide.  You’re giving validation to your detractors.

When it comes to dealing with false information on the Internet (although it is just as valid for true information) my advice is to ignore it.  Or in the case of when you’re trying to hide a security breach, just fix the breach as quickly and quietly as possible.