1202 ALARM

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...