Hi, You do not need sighted assistance to install an enclosure, which is what you're looking for.
The actual term for one that will fit a laptop hard drive is a 2.5 inch hard drive enclosure. They will sometimes have the word external proceeding the name. In either case, there are four screws which you loosen, then the outer case slides off of the main board. At that point, you slide the hard drive into the slot, and fit the contacts into the drive's end, slide the shell over the entire works, then replace the screws, or tighten, them, depending on if you loosened them or took them right off. Once that's done, you can simply plug and play. About the hardest decision you'll need is whether to get an externally powered enclosure, or a self powered enclosure. The former requires that it be plugged into an external power source, in other words, an electrical outlet in your wall, which will sometimes give it more power or transfer speed, but there are a number of factors that will affect that, so don't bother going by that. The latter, self powered ones are much more portable, and smaller, and only require a USB port, or some other port, like firewire, IEEE or serial connection to power it. They tend to be a bit slower in transfer speed, but one can't really help that. Some other considerations you may want to take into consideration are types of connections, as I mentioned above, there are firewire connections, serial and IEEE connections, and some also have a double USB plug so that if the particular port you plug your drive into doesn't have enough power, you can connect the second cable into another USB port, and get that boost of power from the second port. Other things include network availability, but I think those are only available in the externally powered cases, and fail rate, as sometimes the drives outlast the enclosures, which is not really supposed to be the case. Either way, one does not need sight to do this. Victor Co-moderator Audio Central List Blind Movie Buffs List Guidedogs List Visit the JAWS Users List home page at: http://www.jaws-users.com Visit the Blind Computing home page at: http://www.blind-computing.com Address for the list archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/blind-computing@jaws-users.com/ To post to this group, send email to blind-computing@jaws-users.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to blind-computing-le...@jaws-users.com For help from Mailman with your account Put the word help in the subject or body of a blank message to: blind-computing-requ...@jaws-users.com Use the following address in order to contact the management team blind-computing-ow...@jaws-users.com If you wish to join the JAWS Users List send a blank email to the following address: jaws-users-list-j...@jaws-users.com
