Around a year ago I was asked to coordinate the music for a wedding at our church. I had a few tracks on CD for accompanying live singers, plus a few MP3s with the actual wedding ceremony music (The Wedding March, etc). I had my DELL notebook hooked up to the sound system and was just playing those mp3s straight from it.
Anyway, the bridal entourage had lined up, and was waiting to enter the sanctuary. The cue for them to enter was for the music to begin playing. Unbelievably my laptop crashed without my even touching it - it played a "siren" like sound and shut down. I didn't have a second to spare - I didn't even have the 60 seconds it took for that notebook to boot. So I grabbed my iPaq 3630 out of my bag, popped in the CF card (I had the mp3s stored on a CF card in a PCMCIA adapter sleeve in my laptop), plugged the 1/8 cable from the sound system into the headphone jack, and fired up Windows Media Player. Without so much as an extra 10 second delay the ceremony began.
After the dust had settled, and after glaring at my DELL for a short while (as if it could sense my absolute disgust - I had been using it DAILY for 3 years straight and it had never done that before), I checked everything out and found the problem. Some how the HDD had come loose, and the siren was a BIOS warning that the HDD controller had failed. So after removing and reinserting the HDD everything was fine.
So, my old, abused, dust-filled-screen, loose-stylus iPaq 3630 literally saved the day.
This is a true story. Anyone else have a story about their PPC coming to the rescue?
Dan East
