Another Day Off....Woe Is Me......

Well; as it turned out, the daughter came down with Strep AND the flu, so after Mom took Monday off, Tuesday came my turn (since her fever didn't go down). So, what's a Frugal Propellerhead to do, trapped at home with his toys!?!

Go ahead and dismantle that bridge used to "cross the technological Rubicon", of course! The last two everyday computers left in our house that didn't run on an SSD boot drive are my daughter's IBM ThinkPad X30 of 2003, running Windows XP, and my son's IBM ThinkPad Z60t also running Windows XP. That almost 10 year old X30 had a lot of my hard work in it. I wanted it to be very friendly first computer for her. It was disassembled and I spent the better part of a week, cleaning, sanding, and painting all the upper case parts a nice little girl oriented lavender. I called it the "Princess Edition" ThinkPad. My original intention was to eventually replace the bottom of it with an almost physically identical X31....which still resides in a cabinet by the way. She'd then, still have her lavender computer and be upgraded from a PIII-M/1.2 to a P-M/1.6 machine. It doesn't sound like much, but that completely bypasses the whole P4-M generation! 

 

However, after bringing a "parts" X61 back from the dead and being in possession of a spare 64Gb SSD left over from my X300 upgrade the last time she was sick.....well, it was an easy decision! Plus, after checking the chipset information and the parts list of the X61, I realized that in all probability, I wouldn't even have to reload the OS! ......And sure enough, it was almost a perfect swap. It did require a 1.8" Micro-SATA to 2.5" SATA drive adapter. Of course Microsoft made me reactivate Windows 7 because of the change in hardware, and I had to uninstall a few things, but it couldn't have gone smoother. Although still sick and coughing, the daughter was very happy with the "new", MUCH faster computer!

Then, there I sat, all puffed up with success and the other "spare" SSD sitting on my desk, taunting me. What's a dad supposed to do? I went down the hall and got my son's laptop of course! So, out came the old 120Gb mechanical drive and in went the $30 Dell 50Gb SSD (Samsung OEM) drive that I had used as a temporary when the Mushkin went down. A couple of hours later, his Z60t was fully loaded and configured, ready for use. Of course, there's going to be hours of, and hundreds of, that mana from heaven otherwise known as Critical Updates. There was the somewhat major snag of the lack of Windows 7 drivers for Intels Express 900 integrated GPU. Yeah, as it turns out, Intel never got around to releasing drivers for that chipset, so I had to use Vista versions in compatibility mode. It'll work though. But hey; it's a small price to pay to have both kids happy with dad's work for today!

Here's the real pay-off though. Just like I've been incessantly harping on all these posts on how great of an upgrade the SSDs are at today's prices. This was the perfect example. These weren't new machines. My son has been using the Z60t for over a year and I've had that X61 working for a number of months as well. While neither was a terrible slug, they are both way snappier than they were before the upgrades. I didn't change anything else either, there was no RAM upgrade or CPU change. The 50Gb cost $30. The 128Gb that I put into the X300 costs $90 after shipping. So all-in-all, I spent $120, got one machine upgraded and two others switched to a "game-changing" device. Plus, we are all on the same, newer 20v ThinkPad A/C adapters, and ALL the computers run the same Windows 7 OS! That's a pretty good day (off), in my world.

Now.....about that noisy file server with a mechanical boot drive......