Phase 1 of the laptop refresh project (replacement battery and new RAM) has gone off mostly uneventfully so far. My initial test of the battery gave me a bit of a surprise when the laptop shut itself off after 30 minutes and 86% capacity. For a while I thought I had a dud battery until I realized that it was probably the laptop power profile setting that caused it to turn off. Resetting it to a different profile that didn’t automatically hibernate or shut down gave me much better results, with the laptop running for about 3 hours doing distributed.net work (with the CPU throttled down to half speed on battery power). After a couple of tests, I’m much more confident in the battery now.
The added RAM has done much to improve the performance of the laptop. No more green disk like blinking on constantly while Windows shuffles memory pages in and out of virtual memory. Althought Windows still acts pretty dog slow, it’s much better than it was.
The new hard drive arrived today, so phase 2 can begin any time. Probably won’t do anything until the weekend though. The so far plan is to:
* remove the existing drive and place it into an enclosure
* install the new drive
* create two 60GB partitions on the new drive
* install Windows on one partition
* install Linux (either Fedora 10 or Ubuntu) on the other partition
* restore data from the old drive and reinstall applications
10 years of UserFriendly
Yay, my 10th anniversary mega uber UserFriendly collection has arrived!
The t-shirt is pretty slick too. And the book is even autographed.
I’m going to enjoy reading this.
Dog owner sign #7
Every pocket you reach into has at least one (unused) poop bag
Meaty goodness at Amazon Grill
Today’s meetup at Amazon Grill was nice with 9 people showing up and a few new faces, which is always nice.
Bacon wrapped chicken for Heather
For the record, @mydwynter wants a karaoke meetup one of these days. I’m pretty sure it could be arranged. There’s been talk about a potluck meetup on the twittertubes. Karaoke would probably make a fine addition to that meetup.
Laptop refresh project
The laptop I use for work is getting a little long in the tooth (about 5 years old now), but still pretty functional, aside from having to have Windows on it. It’s time to make it more functional with some much needed and long overdue upgrades. Windows has been behaving pretty dog slow on it for a while now and is way past time for a fresh install to get rid of 5 years of leftover software crap that’s built up.
2GB RAM – $51
I originally asked for a laptop with 1GB RAM, but for some reason it turned into 512MB when the order was placed. How I’ve been limping along running Windows in 512MB of RAM for all these years, I have no idea. The extra memory will definitely be nice though.
6600mAh battery – $72
About a year ago, the original battery went belly up and stopped holding any significant charge. The battery would last about 10 minutes before petering out, so I was restricted to only being able to use the laptop whenever I could plug in. Kind of defeats the purpose of having a laptop. New battery will make me portable again.
120GB hard drive – $60
I’m nowhere near running out of space on the original 60GB hard drive, but a larger hard drive will give me the chance to set up a dual-boot Linux/Windows system, which is something I’ve always wanted to do. The original drive I’ll pop into an enclosure and use it for portable backup.
Considering the fact that I apparently lost one of the DVI outputs on my work computer video card, on top of the earlier computer fail that happened Monday, I may be tempting fate with all of these upgrades. The way things have been going so far, with my luck some other component in the laptop will die and kill the thing shortly after I get all of these upgrades installed.