1202 ALARM

I bought this Tecknet dual SATA external hard drive dock a few years ago and it's been very useful when I've been upcycling laptops, particularly for cloning one drive to another. The source drive goes in the A slot and the target drive in the B slot, press the clone button on the front and the unit does the rest.  The target drive must be blank and have the same or a larger capacity than the source drive. If the source is bootable then the target will be too. The only issue is that unless the drives are identical in size, the target will have a primary partition the same size as the source followed by unallocated space. This is easily fixed by using GParted to expand the primary partition to fill the whole drive. The unit has a USB 3.0 connection so also invaluable for backing-up prior to upgrading Linux Mint.

I haven't used my remaining Raspberry Pi 2 for a while, but dug it out recently. I had to update the operating system which now has options for over-clocking the CPU to 1GHz as long as you can cool it so there is also an option to run a fan.  The miniature 5v fan recovered from a broken laptop super glued onto a miniature heat sink recovered from a Sky+ box. Prototyping the control circuit using a BS170 MOSFET with the gate connected to GPIO pin 14. Using pin 14 puts the 3 connections in a row (+5v/GND/GPIO14) on the RPi GPIO connector making for easy fitting. The circuit constructed on a piece of stripboard with a recovered 3-pin connector from some long dead piece of kit. The completed fan on top of the RPi's Broadcom CPU with a drop of thermal paste between them. So I enabled the fan and over-clocking and ran the Pi for 2 hours running YouTube videos and a spreadsheet. A little faster but the fan never came on! Seems the heat s...

I was given this really nice HP 350 G2 laptop by a very kind lady on Freegle. As is usually the case it was running slow under Windows. I offered to install Linux, but she had bought a new laptop and just wanted this one to be used. This is the first 15w laptop I've worked on and it needs low power RAM (1.25v), which I didn't have in stock, so I purchased a 4Gb module on eBay for under £5 delivered. This took the total memory to a respectable 8Gb. A 512Gb SSD upgrade (under £20, AliExpress) and a clean install of Linux Mint and I have a decent laptop to do me for the next 3 years. Performance is fine for my needs (mostly web browsing, Zoom and some hobby coding). The CPU is an i5-5200 which seems to be the fastest that the motherboard can handle so I won't be changing the CPU this time. HP Pavilion G6 CPU Upgrade As I usually do, I'm going to cycle my i7-3632M HP Pavilion G6 (above) into the workshop, which will leave two older laptops to pass on via...

I was given this older Apple iPad a while back and was looking into installing Linux on it. Options are limited, but it is possible to install a shell to the iPad and run command line stuff.  SSH is always a bit of fun so I logged into my Linux Mint laptop remotely for a giggle. It was interesting running a few simple commands from the iPad. My cheapo Bluetooth keyboard came in very useful although I discovered that the iPad's OS version predated mouse support so the trackpad didn't work. Going a step further, I got my Raspberry Pi going again and was able to install VNC on the iPad and remotely control the Raspberry Pi's desktop. Could be useful! I'm also looking at fitting a small heatsink and 5-volt fan (recovered from a broken laptop) to the Raspberry Pi and over clocking it to 1GHz.

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...

  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:...

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,...

A nice HP laptop I was given by another kind Freegle user which had stopped working. It is about 4 or 5 years old and nicely specified for running Linux Mint with 4 GB of ram and a fast multi-core Intel processor running at 2.2 GHz. The guy's kids had been using it and it was covered in colourful stickers, which was cute, but it was also full of dust, probably because the kids had been sitting on the carpet to use the computer. This is really common and you see the same with Playstations and XBox consoles because they are usually put under the television on the floor. The computer was reporting a fan failure which a bit of research turned out to be very common for this model. The fan sounded like it was on its last legs, so a full strip down was needed, then a serious clean out to remove all the dust and finally a replacement fan off eBay for about £4. The keyboard wasn't great so I got a new one of those as well for £7, total cost of parts £11. I car...