I can’t seem to fall asleep yet, so here are some other random tech bits for the day.
Today, I worked on an laptop that the user had the desktop picture changing every 5 seconds. It’s the first time I’ve seen someone do that on purpose and it made working on it…interesting. The other thing I noticed was that it only had the 256 MB of RAM that it shipped with. This made the machine run, as a coworker would put it, “as slow as smoke off wet shit”. For pretty much any computer, Linux, Windows or OS X, RAM is the easiest thing you can add to speed up or your system. Or, as in this case, using too little RAM is the easiest way to cripple an otherwise good one. How much is enough? Well, there is a geek saying that you can never be too thin or have too much RAM. These days, I’d say 1GB of RAM is a good place to start (that is 4 times the amount in the laptop above).
Here is another odd bit. The blogging software I’m using is an hour behind on the post time. I’ll have to go back and fix that in a few hours.
I’ve been needing to finish an iBook for Angela’s niece before we head up to Knoxville this weekend. The Combo drive was bad and it needed to be replaced. It’s been a bit of a convoluted story on trying to find a cheap way to do that. The short form is first the CD drive went bad, so I replaced it with a drive from a old Sony laptop. I still needed to get an external plastic cover for it, but it worked. By the time I found a good deal on the cover, the drive stopped working. So, I go to eBay and find a drive from another Sony laptop (it was cheaper than buying an Apple part) to replace it. That part finally comes in a couple days ago and I put the drive in today…only to find it there is a problem with this one too (the downside of eBay, “AS IS” auctions)!
After banging my head against a wall a couple times, I took a look at the problem. Usually, with components like this, they either work or they don’t. I’m not the kind to replace chips on a board to solder things much. In this case though, I dug into the guts of the drive and got one working drive, out of the two non-working Sony drives I had sitting there! It wasn’t my original (simple) plan, but now the iBook I bought for Angela a couple years ago can now be put to good use again.
For me, the same thing that drives me to draw is also what drives me to work on computers. Being able to take component parts or something broken and make it useful is as much a charge in it’s own way as taking the paper, pencil and ink to create something.
