A few weeks ago one of my Pocket PCs had a headphone jack that went on the spritz. So I sent it off to a company to have it “fixed.”

What I sent: A working Pocket PC with a stylus with intermittent headphone jack usage. And $80.

What I got back: A working Pocket PC without a stylus and a headphone jack that doesn’t work at all.

I literally would have been better off just burning the $80. At least then I would have a stylus and intermittently working headphone jack.

I talked to them and they swear that there was no stylus on the unit that I sent, but were apologetic about the whole not-fixing-what-I-paid-them-to-fix-and-in-fact-make-it-worse thing. However, they acted like I should be grateful that it was under warranty. We’ll see how that goes.

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Apparently, when Windows 2000 said that there was a problem with my harddrive and asked if I wanted to fix it, it meant that there was not a problem with my hard drive and was asking if I wanted to change that.

Before it “fixed” the drive, there were no problems with it. After it “fixed” it, 3/4 of my directories are inaccessible.

Just over a month ago I lectured to Ethan the virtue of keeping all of your data on a separate hard drive (or better yet, a separate computer):

I came by this one the hard way, but I have breathed easier ever since. If nothing else, you can disconnect the second hard-drive if you’re about to do anything potentially hazardous. I’ve twice had partition formatting expand beyond the scope of the partition I had assigned.

Of course, having your data on a separate drive doesn’t do nearly as much good if you leave it plugged in when you reinstall Windows. So it did something to my data drive right after installing Windows 2000. Unfortunately, I was letting it do its thing so I couldn’t stop it in time, but it said that it was fixing it.

Luckily it wasn’t an actual storage drive. I mostly used it as a dumping ground for when I rip and encode video for my Pocket PC. Unfortunately I have been a little lax in getting the actual DIVX files off the drive and some stuff was lost.