Image by purpaboo via Flickr

This week I have been asked to fix a computer by someone that I know, he has the computer a little over a year now and it has suddenly stopped working for him. Once the computer starts up you see the manufacturers splash screen, then nothing! It just stays there.

I thought it was a bit strange after a while of looking about I saw that the computer was not recognising the hard drive that was in the computer! Next I popped open the computer and with great difficulty I managed to get out the enclosure that holds the hard drive in place.

This was now the perfect time to use my external hard drive cables that I bought a while back, I connected the cables up and into my computer and turned the power on and the drive begun to spin, but no usb drive was detected. I thought that was a bit strange because every drive I connected before always got picked up by the computer.

So my last test was to power down my pc, disconnect my hard drive and plug in his hard drive, when I did this I got the same problem as his computer, it would boot to the manufacturers splash screen and go no further, this is when I knew the hard drive had failed. So I reconnected my hard drive and after a bit of online searching I found that the make of this hard drive had actually being given an unbelievable amount of problems, everyone had the same problem as the hard drive I have.

It turn out this hard drive (Seagate Barracuda) would work perfectly one day and you would shut the pc down normally and the next day it would just not work. So basically the hard drive is bricked. The problem apparently was to do with the firmware on the hard drive itself, there is now a fix released for the hard drive which will prevent this from happening, however if your hard drive has already been bricked then there is no way to flash the new firmware onto it.

There is a way to fix these hard drives, someone found this hack that would work involving getting a Nokia Mobile cable and connecting it to the hard drives pins and using HyperTerminal or putty to send commands to it, I think it looks a bit complex so decided not to give it a go.

After a while of looking for a new hard drive online I quickly realised how expensive some people are selling them for. I decided I would go for a Western Digital hard drive as they are the most reliable.

Most hard drives I looked up cost around €70.00 , The current hard drive in the computer had a capacity of 500gb so I asked him if he wanted more space, and since he does a lot of multimedia work he said he could do with a bit more, so we went to the next available size which was 640gb.

The cheapest place I found this hard drive was on Komplett where it was just €54.78, not bad so before I ordered it I said I will have a look in Pc world here in town and the price was just mental, they were selling a 500gb hard drive for around €140.00! Not a chance I was going to buy it from them, so I ordered it from komplett.

The funny thing is that the UK PC world are selling the same hard drive as the Irish PC world for only €70.00! It is ridiculas the way they can have such a huge difference in their prices, so much for a chain store, I thought they all kept their prices the same!

Recently I have been listening to a lot of new bands that I had never heard of before, some that have been recommended to me by my friends and people I work with.

My music interest varies a lot, I could like one song by an artist and completely dislike all of their other songs, for example, I like the song Nothing else matters by Metallica, however I do not like any of their other songs!

Recently I was shown a new artist that I had never heard of, the group are called Florence + the machine, and they are just incredible! My favourite song is “Swimming” and since hearing them I went and bought the album, titled “Lungs”, from iTunes. It is rare to find an album where you like every song and this Lungs album is one of those! Out of my entire library of music in iTunes almost the full ‘Lungs’ album is in my top 25!

The amount of music that I have in my iTunes to actually ridiculas, I currently have a little under 7000 songs! Now most people seeing that many songs would instantly say, there is no way that I would ever listen to all the songs let alone half of them, I would have to completely agree with you, the reason that there is so many songs in my library is not because I personally added them, most of the time my friends come down to my house and would just throw in a cd and rip it into iTunes.

I have tried to go through all my music and remove everything I don’t like however I just get sidetracked as it takes so long to do it. I always say that one day I will just sit down and get rid of everything and then just copy back on what I want, I don’t see that happening anytime soon!

Having so many songs can be very beneficial in one way I suppose, when people come down they can just pop on a song that they like . With one of the last few big releases of iTunes they added one of their best features in my opinion which is called Genius, and they definitely picked the right word for it as it is the best feature ever, in a nutshell Genius basically recommends great songs that go well with the song you are currently listening too when you click the Genius button, it creates a playlist of songs which you can save and refresh as many times as you want!

Why I like it so much is that since I don’t know half of the music that I have it helps me to find new music that I like! , and I get bored of songs after listening to them for so long, so having random playlists of new songs generated for me is just great, the only downside to genius is that you have to have an apple account to use it, that’s fine for me since I buy music from the iTunes store but many of my friends don’t have an apple account so can’t use this feature and making a apple account requires a credit card which many of my friends don’t have.

A few more of my favourite bands would include Belle and Sebastian, Regina Spektor, Ian Brown, The Afghan Whigs, The Smiths,  The National,  Arcade Fire, The Temper Trap and The Stone Roses. I will add some of my favourite songs by these artists below, the videos will be small but you can just double click the video for full screen if you like!

Belle & Sebastian – The Blues Are Still Blue

Regina Spektor – On The Radio

Ian Brown – F.E.A.R

The Afghan Whigs – My Enemy

The Smiths – This Charming Man

The National – Lit Up

Arcade Fire – (Antichrist Television Blues)

The Temper Trap – Down River

The Stone Roses – Waterfall