Right now I'm installing the new Windows 7 RC (release candidate) and the installing seems longer than usual (with a lot of empty screens). But I'd like to go over some of the projects that have happened since the last post.
I have been working with my uncle for a while and have generated some spending money to fund some of my projects / goodies. There were two swap meets that I attended since and I grabbed some used parts to finally build a scrap bike off of an aluminum performance bike frame. The bike was made so that it can be sold to my friend, who is attending UC Davis for his master's degree in civil engineering. Ironically this friend of mine was the one who got me into road cycling and here I am building his bike for school.
To keep it short, the bike was about $300 total and that's exactly what I charged him excluding any personal labor charges. Parts included a neon green aluminum trek fork, shimano 620x (old ultegra) brakeset w/ dura-ace parts, a Giant? 1" threaded headset, itm aluminum 44cm road bar, 3ttt Quil Stem ($35... because of odd specs), Shimano 5500 Shifters (semi-working right shifter), Shimano 6600 rear hub w/ Mavic xp rims, shimano 5500 39/53t crankset/bb, shimano 5500 12-23t cassette, sram pc-991 chain, shimano 600 rear derailleur w/ 11t pulley set, shimano 5500 front derailleur and generic seatpost w/ super used gippimme (not sure how to spell) seat. All this and it weighed under 20lbs. the front wheel was just the old one that came with the bike (some forte brand).
Next the quad-core machine i built from black friday got a few upgrades, my uncle (being my boss) purchased an additional 4GB of ram and also a 300GB velociraptor hard drive as a company expense. I have yet to see the advantage of the hard disk since i really was hesitant to get that upgrade, but he insisted. The ram is helping me run more applications at once - mostly virtual images of servers that i test / develop on.
Because of the desktop I used my laptop less and less and I even re-formated it since it had too much Duovu (old employer) stuff and random files. But i think what really bugged me about my Lenovo T61 was the fact that it had this really annoying fan noise that would start up every time the computer heated up or was running an intense program. SO I got fed up and decided to just take apart the entire thing and get to the fan and figure it out. At first I just dusted it and it didn't seem to help much - that's when i googled around and decided to take it all apart yet again and apply some motor oil to it. Thanks to my dad, who is pretty mechanic savvy, he gave me some oil from japan that seemed to do the trick - no more noise and the machine was super quiet afterwards.
After fixing the noise issue with the laptop, it gave me a lot of experience working with the laptops and gave me some courage to take apart other laptops. A friend of mine, i remembered replaced his old laptop because it overheated - so i troubleshooted this next which was a big success that i was proud of. The problem was that the Dell XPS M170 used a defective Geforce graphics card (7900GTX) that overheats way too much and eventually the card was fried and didn't work well. So i researched a graphics card and narrowed my choices down to a Radeon X300 that came from a Dell Inspiron 9000 series to replace the defective part. After the replacement, the computer worked fine - but i had my doubts so, halfway, i ported all the better parts (7200rpm HD + wifi) to the Dell 700m.
The Dell 700m was my first laptop and it was a great machine - it was ultra portable with little or no compromises. The screen was 12.1" and it was a Pentium M 1.6 Ghz that worked fine during my early college days and will also serve as my sister's new laptop. Anyway after a year the speakers went out and this was caused by the design more than the hardware. The speakers were integrated with the LCD panel and wiring comes out through the right side of the LCD's mount/pivot. Because the LCD panel frequently gets closed the wiring gets worn every time you close the LCD panel. So, after a year, the speaker wires actually split - i believe this is a really bad design so I would never buy laptops with integrated speakers into the LCD of a laptop because of the wear/tear potential. Anyway i tried fixing this up before by reconnecting the wires together - this didn't really go so well and didn't last long since the same wires were used and they eventually go messed up again. So after I got my lust for repairing old laptops, I have decided to purchase replacement wires and solder new wires to the speakers - and this was a success.
After fixing 3 major laptop problems I felt like i could handle just about anything and even considered ebaying parts to upgrade my existing machines but prices never seemed great. After cleaning up a laptop of their dust / lint they seemed great and i guess those speed issues just went away. I have since then helped a few others with their issues: upgrading ram for 2 people, and cleaning the laptop for 2 others. I do this for fun / knowledge so nothing was ever charged for my services. I felt fortunate enough already to have gotten a working Dell XPS laptop for $75 in repairs.
Anyway my windows 7 installation has completed and I had a few minutes to enjoy it - however it was only the 32bit version, so i need to download the 64 bit and try installing that one. The dual core E7400 chip i bought will be my new project computer with windows 7 on its side. Hopefully i can get that old stupid soundblaster card working on it otherwise I'd install windows xp again (64bit). the new CPU was purchased because i had a spare ECS motherboard - it was scary at first because the computer froze after detecting ram. But it was solved after i flashed the bios to a newer version (by using another CPU of mine). The machine is running fine with a 250watt power supply (traded away my 500watt to a friend) - i guess i can use this as proof of how many idiots there are in the world who seem to stand firm on their 1000+ watt investments.
After replacing my old Athlon XP 3500+ I placed an auction online for my 2GB of DDR400 ram (which seems popular) and hopefully i get some money back for all this spending.
All these experiences have made me realize what a tinkerer i am and how persistent i am if i believe something can be fixed.
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