Wednesday, September 10, 2003

Taking Computers Apart

I meant to blog first thing this morning, but since I'd blogged at the end of the day yesterday, I found myself sorely lacking anything to blog about. Actually, last night, I took apart my old Dell laptop that fried a year or so ago. I don't know why I never thought of delving into its innards before, but I hadn't. Dell lays out the insides really nicely, much better than Evelin's fried Compaq (we seem to have an unseemly number of dead computers in the house ... I should do something about that) and the components feel more solid. That being said, it does look like the hard drive is dead (I'm going to test it in the neat gizmo I picked up to salvage info off Evelin's aforementioned Compaq; basically it lets you convert a laptop hard drive into a USB mass storage device) and, although I didn't see any immediate signs, I'm sure the power supply is toasted. I want to figure out what I can salvage from it, the RAM in it doesn't improve upon what is already in the Gateway Evelin bought as surplus from the university, so I can't use that, but maybe I can figure some use for some of the other parts.

Work is plugging along. Despite a number of side distractions, I achieved my goal of getting all of the regular magazine looked at in Quark; tomorrow, I can go back and forth between pages and the contract publishing magazine, which I should see in Quark in the morning. I've put down my foot, insisting that I will not be working this weekend; although I did crack and say I could come in after watching the pandas Sunday evening, but I am counting on no one taking me up on that...

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