Goin' Mobile

Published on May 11, 2007 By Gideon MacLeish In Misc

After my "perfect day" on Wednesday, I finally got to start to sort through the haul yesterday (it will actually be awhile before I've totally calculated the haul). The main concern of mine was the laptop. I don't have a laptop, and I'm starting to need one. I have an HP that was given to me, but it has a bad power jack. We have a chance to save the machine by having a new jack soldered on (fortunately, I know exactly ONE person who's good enough at soldering to give it a real shot. One person, though, is enough).

I powered up yesterday, and it powered up fine. System specs: PIII 600 mHz proc, 512 GB RAM, 12GB HD. Not good enough to run several apps, but fine for what I'm using it for. I'm not going to be using it for anything remotely fancy, mostly word processing and onsite diagnostics. The only downside was that it ran extremely slow. It didn't take long to find out why. There were a lot of junk programs, and worse...and there were about 3GB of hard drive space free.

After playing with it a little bit I decided it was time for a clean install. The system was using a lot of the resources, and it was a little buggy. Besides, I would have had to do a LOT of cleaning otherwise.

I was pleased to see that the key was a private key, as I had suspected (this laptop had shipped with Windows 98, although it was built for Windows 2K and NT 4.0 as well, and so it was an upgraded O/S). I pulled the key and about an hour later had a nicely working laptop. Fortunately it was a Dell, so drivers were not a problem (Dell is BY FAR the easiest to find the drivers).

If we can bring the HP back to life, I may make this one an Ubuntu machine. It should BLAZE on that.

So, anyway, I have my laptop, and it is running well. All is right with the world.

Comments

MasonM

on May 12, 2007

512GB of RAM????????

Don't hold your breath on the HP power jack. They're notorious for the board cracking around that point. It's a design flaw that was found in both the HPs and Compaqs. Resoldering might help for a short while but eventually it'll go down again. I speak (write) from experience.

Gideon MacLeish

on May 12, 2007

512 mb

sorry, I was tired...it was the end of the day...lol

I'm not holding my breath on the HP...if it doesn't work, I will either a) keep scouting for an HP with a tested good mobo, or

pull parts for this machine. I can already get a few bucks for the two SODIMM sticks in the HP, and it has a DVD burner (mine doesn't) and a larger HD...as well as a working wireless card (which idiot me did NOT think of until I'm sitting here at my desk unable to get it).

Dr Guy

on May 12, 2007

I'm not holding my breath on the HP...

Nothin against you, HP or whoever. But when HP merged with Compaq, I wrote them off. YOu can win a customer easily. But if you lose one, it takes a lot to get them back. Comcrap has not done that yet for me.

And as for the memory, if Mason had not pointed it out, I would not have noticed!

But I want a computer with that much!

Gideon MacLeish

on May 12, 2007

well, like I said, the power jack's a crapshoot. But it's a crapshoot worth taking. It cost me all of $27 to find out.

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