Netbook: No CD Drive? No Problem, Revisited.

I took my netbook with me on our Thanksgiving trip and had a bit of a scare. I got in a hurry and shut off the power before it was finished logging off. The next time I tried to turn on my netbook, it displayed an error message telling me that there was a corrupt file and it would not boot.  It suggested that I install the XP disk and run the Recovery Console. Great, but as I have discussed before, I do not have a CD drive. I also did not have a Windows XP installation disc with me on our trip.

Thanks to the wonderful internet I was able to fix my netbook within an hour of getting home. I found this site with instructions on installing Microsoft Windows XP from a usb device. I followed the instructions to start the installation, selected the Recovery Console option, ran fixboot and voilà, I am happily typing away on my netbook after successfully rebooting.

I was concerned that the corrupted boot file might require me to get an optical drive but I am thrilled that I was able to find the necessary information and files online to fix my problem without the optical drive.

You mean not everyone loves the paperless office?

I came across a post at Paralegalese titled Words That Do Not Mix: Paperless Law Office. As the I.T. guru at our firm, I have been seeking to use computers to increase efficiency within our firm and regularly see articles touting the paperless office for law firms to increase efficiency and decrease costs. I guess at this point I agree with some of what is stated in the blog posts but I still find that having the digital documents available is nice.

We have a combined approach at this point, partially due to some of the older staff being set in their ways, where everything is scanned but it is also placed in paper files. Running the paper through the scanner prior to the next work flow step does not seem to take too much extra time and has greatly improved our ability to work from multiple locations, including home. Our goal is to have everything digital for convenience and backup but it still is helpful at times to be able to spread out a file on the desk to review more than one or two monitors will efficiently allow.