Midget

Bin it, they weren't exactly the best made drives around. You could grab Victoria Hard Drive Diagnostics utility and check for bad/slow sectors.

How strange, and yes you're right. Can you activate any new machines at all? What's the output of "slmgr.vbs -dli" ?

Did it happen the first time you time you installed the new hard drive? basically I'm asking if the laptop's been dropped. What make are the HDDs?

Chuck the Volume Activation Management Tool (VAMT) 2.0 tool onto the KMS server and add the machines into it and try to manually activate. Also run the following command "slmgr.exe /dlv" to check the count level.

I've used oneLAN boxes in the past, pretty good simple to use systems.

ah that's very good! not sure how good spin rite is, I certainly wouldn't buy it over better software out there. If you can get a copy of Hirens Boot CD there are some good bits of software on there, and I'm sure I don't have to tell you not to write the data back to that hard drive. If you have any questions, feel free to ping me a PM

you took the lid off!? why? If the drive hasn't physically failed you shouldn't be opening it. you want to check the disk against a disk check utility like victoria to see if it has bad sectors, if it doesn't then R-studio should recover most of your data. or if you want to continue with the stupid myths, why not chuck it into a freezer for a few days.

not some Hot Coffee™ then?

would the E2915 not be what you want? or the E2910 as a direct replacement for the 2800?

Another arm of the company I currently work for has OneLAN boxes for the TV displays. I've had a play around with making new templates and things on them and they're pretty straight forward to use. Basically they're a nettop box with centos and then the onelan software installed on them (although you can only buy the boxes, not the software separately apparently). No idea how much they cost though.

check point will work with registered forensic and DR places to provide a way to recover the data if all the correct details that the end customer would have are provided. Less helpful with individuals. Decent price? good luck! On Track would be your best bet to ensure they recover the data, but your view of decent price will be different to them, lets just say if it's only 3 figures you'll be lucky. I can suggest someone who'll give it a go, but they'll probably want a part payment up front to cover the time they spend investigating it (obviously let THEM suggest it, not you) incidentally this is the whole point of WDE, it's difficult to recover. If you don't have all the things you as the owner should have, then you won't be able to.

RStudio. GetDataBack is also ok at recovery. I shouldn't suggest it, but as it's an emergency, you could obtain it from "the usual places" on the Hiren's bootCD, however that would obviously be frowned upon.

if you went with VMWare View you could use a Teradici based ZeroClient - there are a few manufacturers of these and they're pretty slick.

Reading that they are going to be keeping both. Main Mint which is upstream based on ubuntu. and LMDE which is based on Debian Testing. And I, for one, welcome our new geeky overlords

ones that cost £200. Just get a basic one with dual DVI which can kick out the res you want as it's hardly going to be tasked and older recent chipsets are more supported