I have always loved Dells (well since about the mid 90s).  And yesterday, I found I had an even better reason to love them!

My sister-in-law suffered a fire at her house a couple of years ago.  The house was a total loss (which is a shame - have you ever heard of the Hobbit House?  That was hers.)  By the time my wife and I got out there several months later, they had cleared the rubble and were fighting the insurance company over money.  In that rubble apparently was her laptop.

Too bad I told her.  The data may have been salvageable.  Well, lo and behold this year she found that she had not thrown out the laptop, and gave it to me to see if I could do anything with it.

Now this Dell is old.  The fire was 2 years ago.  The stupid thing only had 256mb of memory, so I suspect it was at least 3 years old when it was burned.  And it is not one of those sleek new notebooks that weigh about 1.5 pounds (this one clocks in at about 6-7), so it is rugged.  I was not really hopeful, but figured I would give it a shot.

I pulled the drive out, mounted it into an external USB case and plugged it into my laptop.  Brnnnnnggg!  Up came the drive with all the data!  ALL THE DATA!

I am very pleasantly surprised! I was able to recover all her data and saved it on to a memory stick (the drive was only a 60gb, only a quarter full - so a memory stick that holds all the data is cheap these days).

Over the years, I have had many good experiences with Dell.  I can add another one.  The computer itself is DOA, but the drive was protected by the "arm-breaker) case it was in and works fine!  I intend to give her the drive back to so she can have some temporary storage (I would not trust it for important stuff, just for a temporary back up).

Thanks again Dell!  You did it again!