Admission of Stupidity

I don't know how many Pc's I've built and fixed over the years; I lost track. tonight I installed a new USB3 PCI slot adapter board. I removed the screw holding in the blank cover plate and pushed the board into the Motherboard slot, hooked up the 5 and 12 volt Molex power plug to it. Had a little trouble getting the mounting bracket to slide in, but got it in. Powered it back up, installed the new driver, and went to plug in a USB cable to try it out. DUH!!!!!!!!!!! I could not get it in. WHY? cause I never removed the blank cover plate. I did not notice it earlier because it does have holes punched into. Dark cramped work area, failing eyesight, and stupidity. No alcoholic drinks before doing it, but I think its Margarita time. fix it in the AM. OLE!

 

Kind of like when I was extending the wire on a submersible well pump last weekend. Put the heat shrink on the first wire and crimped them together. Immediately progressed to the second wire, crimped it, then remembered I did not put the heat shrink on. Seems like after the first wire I would have had it down...

I did get the heat shrink on the third and fourth wires before crimping.

 

Decades ago, I sold someone a WorPerfect upgrade on 5 1/4. I offered to go to her office and install it but she was insulted saying she was fully capable of installing the upgrade.

Shortly after, she calls to complain that I sold her defective disks. She went on to say the first disk was OK but the second disk wouldn't read. To make a long story short, she didn't remove disk 1 and just crammed disk 2 along side it. She was adamant she followed the instructions... "It didn't say I had to remove disk 1" was her defense.

 

This morning I removed the adapter card and the still in place bracket that I did not remove last night. Now I have a place to plug in a USB 3 device, and all I need is a USB external hard drive to plug into it. It works fine with any USB 2 device plugged in. Still, I don't know WHY I bought the adapter, as my PC has ESATA ports in the back, and I have an ESATA external hard drive that I use for backups. I guess it was an impulse purchase!

 

My wife's laptop has both eSATA and USB3 but my laptop only has eSATA and USB2. I use an external eSATA dock but also have several USB external HDs. I really don't like the stiff eSATA cable that came with the dock and would like to try one that purports to be ultraflex. IMHO eSATA connectors are a piss poor design. They should have given it a positive lock like DisplayPort has.

 

I forgot to mention that my Dell Laptop also has an ESATA port that I use to back it up. I just bought my wife a new HP Desktop, but it has only USB 2 and NO ESATA ports. Gotta open it up and see if there is an extra SATA header on the motherboard that I can hook a bracket up to. That way I can just keep using my external ESATA hardrive to back up all 3. But, I'll have to put a bigger drive in that Antec case, as mine is only 500GB at the this time.
I'm not too fond of those cables or connectors either, but they work well and are so fast