1202 ALARM

So I bought this Minitel terminal to play about with for what I thought was a knock-down price, but the seller didn't package it well enough and I ended up with a Minitel that made some nasty noises and didn't work, not even in its native language of French. I got around to taking it all apart and unfortunately discovered that the CRT had suffered terminal damage, which explained the arcing noises. These things operate at a very high voltage so I wasn't about to start mucking around with it, so it went in the bin. I tried connecting the power board back up to the logic board to see if I could get the thing to at least switch on, but that didn't work either so I have to assume that the damage is more extensive. When I get time I will try and decode the signals on the 8-pin connector between the power and logic boards and see if I can power the board directly. Apparently one of the lines is a video feed, but it is in a non-standard format. I should be able to get somethi...

Putting all of it together, here is my recently upgraded HP Pavilion G6 laptop connected to the 39-inch ISIS television ( see post here ), both of which were given to me as broken items by kind people of Freegle. I bodged a backlight repair for the TV for nothing using scrap LEDs, which lasted over a year and when that failed I took a punt and bought a new set of backlight LED strips on eBay for about £15 rather than dump a good large-screen television. It is now working so well, I spent £4 on eBay and bought a remote for it as the original one was missing. Fortnightly 'Virtual Pub' in lock-down with my friends from all over the world, we even had an old mate join us from Singapore even though it was 3 am there! The camera is my dashcam in USB camera mode (I haven't been driving much as I'm working 12-hour days from home instead). The laptop can cope with the big screen only in this set-up otherwise the GPU tends to overheat. Oh, I n...

So I decided to go for the ultimate upgrade on my trusty HP Pavilion G6 laptop which was given to me 3 years ago by a kind guy on Freegle. At the time I had to replace the fan and keyboard to get it going ( see post here ), but this upgrade was at another level entirely as I've never swapped out a laptop CPU before.  A lot of research went into this to make sure I was getting the right APU (combined CPU and graphics processor or GPU), because the same motherboard can work with a wide range of Intel and AMD processors. I went for broke and got the most powerful one the motherboard could handle for £20 on eBay along with an additional 4Gb RAM to bring it up to 8Gb. Here is the old 2-core APU (E2-3000M) ready to be removed. And the replacement 4-core APU (A8-3520M) installed with a smearing of heatsink paste ready for reassembly. So did it work? Thankfully yes and I am editing this post using the computer. The GPU runs a little hot which I am keeping an eye on,...