Hey, Miss J!

Song: Heart ~ Barracuda

I got ahold of a laptop and was told that maybe I could fix it up. When I noted that it was likely unfixable, I was told that I could just dispose of it.

But… to make sure I wiped the hard drive.

I tried to explain that the laptop didn’t even see its own hard drive. I’ve never seen a machine that needed a thumb drive to turn on. The thumb drive wasn’t even working. I did test after test and all of them said the same thing.

The hard drive couldn’t be read.

The start up menu had no connections.

I managed to get into the BIOS, and I didn’t even see hard drive as an option for booting. I was so confused…

The reason I was so confused is that a friend of mine had used the same laptop, but for the life of me, I have no clue how. Once I opened the back… cos, hey – I figured I could harvest parts off of it… I saw the hard drive… free floating.

It was connected, but not exactly connected. I noticed there was also no caddy in there, which might help explain why the hard drive wasn’t working properly. Nothing could hold it in place.

So any little bump would cause the hard drive to disengage.

Since I’ve been told that I can just dispose of this laptop, I’ve decided to keep it. I’ll use it for music and my writing. I’ve wanted a laptop I felt safe to write on the front porch with.

And of course, since Amazon seems to have a sale on Western Digital SSDs, I went and ordered a 2TB, which used to be close to $300. I’m swapping the drive in my business machine for the 2TB drive. The 1 TB drive is going into the new computer.

Well… New/Old laptop.

I… miiight have gone a bit overboard with ordering parts for it.

I always do that with laptops… unfortunately.

New bits and bobbles:

• New/used hard drive
• New keyboard
• New battery
• Laptop decal
• Hard drive caddy

I’ve also ordered a cloning machine, because I want to keep the operating system on the current hard drive.

Now, the next question would be: “Well, how big is the old drive and why are you ditching it?”

The old laptop I believe was a windows 7 machine, which means that it has a hard disk drive. Those things are about as wobbly as I am trying to balance on a step.

Plus, the drive has 80 GBs of space.

I didn’t even see 80 GB as an option. I did see 1 TB, which was like maybe $45. Last time I bought one, it cost what the 2 TB costs now… like $100 and some change. For the first time, I saw 4TB and it wasn’t like $400 – $600.

Wait… Correction, I now have 2 new SSDs on the way. The other one is 250 GB. I’ll swap out the hard drive out of the Latitude.

Yes… I now have 4 fully working… Wait. I have 5 fully working laptops. All of them for different purposes.

No clue what I’ll do with the latitude. It needs a new battery… and I have no idea if I want to put more time and $$ into replacing its power cable and battery.

One thing I will do now is start up invoices for how much these laptops cost me in parts and how much I’m going to charge if a friend wants to buy it. I don’t recoup much at all for working on laptops.

However, I do get how much I spent back with a bit on the top. And I get to help them dodge paying a lot of $$ to a technician.

My rates might just be going up though.

I don’t know yet…

I think in the next week or so, I’ll be working a friend through resetting the administrator boot password she has in a desktop. I told her it’s the CMOS battery, but I don’t think she believes me. Or had the battery out for a few seconds.

With older towers, it’s best to just give them a half hour with no CMOS battery.

Or you can try to ‘fast track’ it. You pull the CMOS battery, boot up the PC, then shut it down, boot it up again, shut it down and put the battery back in. The administrator password should be erased then.

I remember when I took my desktop to my aunt for her to fix a problem, only for her to create a brand-new problem that I had to pay like $130 at this tech place to fix. The administrator password was messed up. Knowing what I do now? The man probably just changed out my CMOS battery… which costs like $3 and charged me about $130 for everything including the battery.

She said her son’s computer had the same problem, and I was about to head over there, when she started talking about how she couldn’t afford to pay me.

I told her that instead of paying me between $60 – $80, she can go get a real computer technician… Which I think she did.

And they cost a lot more.

I guess she thought she’d get some free labor out of me.

Not today! Not yesterday, tomorrow or even next week!

~J. Lyst

Got some preliminary vacuuming done, but now I need to finish the cleaning that I never seem to finish doing.

I also figured out that my new kitten is just a few days over 2 months old now.

No wonder she’s so teeny. She’s absolutely adorable though! I was told she was 3 months old, but when I saw her, I was shocked and asked if she really was 3 months old. A 3-month-old cat would be a lot bigger.

She is bold though… and quite clever. She fits right in with the old, cranky one. Oldcat isn’t a fan, but is beginning to umm… tolerate the kitten.  Sort of.