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.