Geeky time

Work was OK except for another slightly perturbing meeting in the afternoon.

Yesterday evening was bored and flung a machine together out of spare parts. It used the old Atom motherboard, 1gb RAM, a 160gb laptop SATA drive and a 120gb IDE drive. Onto this mixture of parts I installed Windows Server 2012, because I could. It took forever to install and set itself up but once done it runs OK. Not sure what it'll do, if anything, but it was fun.

Really cold this morning. The car was frozen up and it was saying it was -4 on the way to work.

Another geeky evening. Someone in work said they had a laptop with a busted power connector, and they asked if I could install the new board that has the connector on it. It was a Dell Inspiron 1545, and it wasn't until I got home and looked at the service manual that I realised the charger board, as it's called, is literally underneath every other part. So it had to come completely apart, which also meant the CPU had to be regunked and everything. Fortunately the part went in OK and it fired up again without any issues. The Inspirons are definitely not in the same class as the Latitudes, not as easy to work on at all. Still, at least it wan't a Mac.

After that I looked at the Series 3mx I picked up recently. It was the pinnacle of the Psion Series 3 range, the last model with the faster CPU. Unfortunately both hinges were smashed. I did have a spare Series 3c that had good hinges, so I took them apart and put the mainboard from the 3mx into the 3c. So now it's a true frankenstein. The outside of it is branded as an Xemplar PocketBook III (for education), the screen half says it's a Series 3c and the keyboard is labeled as a 3mx. To confuse things even more the underside now has the shiny grey SSD doors and battery cover from the 3mx casing.

Watched a couple more episodes of The Walking Dead season 3, which is already massively better than the dull whinge-fest that was season 2, which felt like it could have been done in a couple of episodes.

I'm a hapless geek and I don't care.