1202 ALARM

This is another Dell laptop I was given a while back. I really like the size of this one, but the hard drive had been removed for security purposes and turned out to be one of those unusual sub-2.5 inch ones that were on the go about 10 years ago. As luck would have it, someone else had given me a knackered iPod Classic which I happened to know used the same type of hard drive. The iPod was stripped and I ordered the little adapter cable (£5) to link the hard drive to the motherboard. Linux Mint XFCE is a good choice for a 32-bit system with 2Gb RAM and the laptop is revived. It won't win any sprints, but with patience it can even load a MS Teams spreadsheet on the Chromium browser.  Dell Latitude D420

Recently I was given another box of damaged electronics items including 2 gaming headsets. One was pretty badly smashed up, but yielded a cable with a 4-pole 3.5mm jack plug which turned out to be very useful. The other set was a Turtle Beach 'Ear Force' for the Xbox 360 with an inline amplifier and some unusual connections for the Xbox, but not much use with a PlayStation, mobile phone or PC.  I dismantled the little inline amplifier box, stripped out all the gubbins and just soldered the 4 connections from the recovered wire from the other headset to the Ear Force. It took 2 attempts to get the microphone connection the right way round, but it is working a treat now and is a very comfortable headset. The other advantage to this hack is an extra long cable. Nice repair. 

Quick post. Another Vestel 32-inch LCD television with a blown backlight I was kindly given on Freegle/Freecycle. This one is branded Walker which is Glen-Dimplex Ireland and it has a digital satellite receiver and Saorview (Irish Freeview) built in. I managed to repair the blown LEDs using salvaged parts and my new soldering hotplate (£5 on AliExpress), but something still wasn't right and although the backlight checked out, it would only come on for a few seconds and then cut out. This is usually a sign that the current isn't right and the inverter board shuts down as a safety feature. A bit of research revealed that there are 3-volt and 6-volt LEDs and they are hard to identify so that might have been the problem. Back onto AliExpress and I ordered 2 brand new replacement backlight strips for £9 and after installation, here is the television working off a NowTV stick (I have a bunch of these now).

So back in August 2020 I upgraded a HP Pavilion G6 laptop running an AMD CPU. HP Pavilion G6 CPU Upgrade (AMD Processor) A few months ago I got some more laptops and one of these was another HP Pavilion G6. After cleaning it up and installing Linux Mint, I checked out the CPU using the Linux command 'lscpu' (list CPUs), which told me that this second Pavilion G6 was running an Intel Pentium 2020M. Compared to the other laptops I had lying around the performance of the Pentium CPU was pretty poor so I started looking for upgrade options. This being an Intel system board (the previous one was AMD), there were some reasonably tasty upgrades so I went for broke and ordered the fastest option, a used Core i7-3632QM on AliExpress for £60. It took about two weeks to arrive and by that time I had done a bit more research on the HP Pavilion G6 series laptops. While cosmetically the 2 laptops I had looked the same, inside they had important differences. I had downloaded the HP service ma

 I have been a bit lax about putting stuff up here so this is just a link to a YouTube video showing the classic car data streaming system I have been working on in another format from this previous one. Classic Car Data Stream System

  During the first Covid-19 lock down, I bought my son a new Acer Chromebook for home learning, but he decided he preferred the 10-year old Linux Mint laptop he'd been using (and still is, teenagers eh?), so the new computer went to his mum meaning that her 2014 Acer C720 Chromebook was now surplus. I played about with it for a bit, but as Google stopped supporting it with security updates in late 2019 I reckoned it would be worth investigating putting a proper Linux OS onto it. A bit of research led me to the Fascinating Captain's blog http://www.fascinatingcaptain.com/projects/dual-boot-chrome-os-and-linux/ and trial running using live flash drive versions of a couple of Linux distros and I was convinced the laptop was worth upgrading. I bought a 128Gb M.2 SDD for £25 (eBay) to replace the 16Gb one in the C720 and removed the write-protect screw while I had the case apart so that the BIOS could be fully flashed with the excellent update scripts courtesy of MrChromebox. https: