hot steel and cold penguins

[Frosty]

9 hours ago, Paul TIKI said:

with a dongle

HEY, this is a family site don't go talking about your dongle! 

Joking aside, what's a dongle and why is it good? 

Frosty The Lucky.

[Irondragon Forge ClayWorks]

A dongle is a little device that program guy's came up with to drive administrators like me crazy. Usually used with proprietary software. When I was at the PD, I was the network admin for a 20 computer network. Someone was always saying Lt. I have a dongle error...grrrr

I think that's where the saying he can break an anvil in a sand box with a rubber mallet comes from.

[Paul TIKI]

I this particular case the dongle was a good thing.  It's a simple SATA to USB.  Just plug the drive to one end and the usb end to a port on the machine.  There was a license key to some software that was supposed to help you migrate your windows over to the new SSD before you install the drive.  Since I'm running Linux that wasn't an issue, but since the dongle is generic...  I got the drive swapped, then used the dongle to rescue what data I needed from the bad drive.  Nothing critical was lost.  The actual swap was tedious because HP engineers don't like people who take an interest in the guts of their machines (outside of marketing material, that is)

Now all I need is a good 2.5 inch SATA drive to use as a portable backup drive.  Probably partitioned leaving 100 gig or so for a new OS to make it almost hot-swappable.  I have a few other machines that could possibly fall victim...

The end result is I now have a system where boot time is a matter of seconds.  POST takes longer than the OS load.  Peppermint Linux is FAST!

[ThomasPowers]

And mac dongles to connect to a RJ45 port have their own mac addresses.  As many mac users have several dongles and we track usage by the mac this makes our book keeping more difficult than necessary.