okayLast night and today, we're working on trying to bring back to life some of the hard drives on Lisa's computers. Here's an odd thing: she has one IBM T30 she can't use because it doesn't have a touch-pad, but it will boot. We cloned its hard drive. The clone wouldn't boot, but if I booted from the Windows CD and ran FIXBOOT, the clone worked just fine. A couple of other drives seemed to only need to have FIXBOOT run on them, but one of them began throwing STOP 7A and other my-drive-is-dying errors, so I suggested to Lisa that she get any files off of it that she can -- the drive is more or less readable as a non-booting device -- and discard it.
We'd install from scratch on a larger drive, except that for some reason any installation from scratch comes with the default setting of maximizing all windows, and Lisa very much does not want this. It's a tremendous pain in the neck to keep having to reset computers, and it's also frustrating that -- if our online searches are telling us anything -- that nobody else considers this a problem. We've found lots of ways of forcing all new windows to maximize, but hardly anyone seems to think it's worthwhile for new windows to not be maximized.
