Swing Through West Texas

Right in the middle of my "end of year" came an unexpected trip to the "panhandle" region of West Texas. This came as a result of my needing to represent the family at a funeral outside of Lubbock, which then led to a quick run up to Amarillo to visit my wife's family. For all of you who have been out there, all this home nostalgia resulted in many hours of driving down straight flat highways! You needn't feel too badly for me, as I used all those hours in a useful manner.

 

 Most of it was a "shake-down cruise" for the Tahoe. If any of you have ever lived in Texas (and driven around it) for any length of time; you'll understand why the Tahoe/Suburban is the national vehicle of Texas! They're even made right here in Arlington! Let me start by saying that it's absolutely the most comfortable highway cruiser I've ever driven, bar none! The wife and kids just love it. From a propellerhead standpoint, it's got everything guys like me would need. Although the kids watched movies on their tablets via the wifi enabled Lenovo F800 storage drive (which was and still is awesome), the in-vehicle entertainment system did come into play. 

That system has an external input, and so before we left, I swung by our storage unit and dug the Nintendo Gamecube out of my son's stuff. It was a hit! I also bought one of those prefab plastic storage consoles which not only held all their drinks, but the controllers and games as well. This complete with headphones made the rear of the vehicle an isolated "kid-zone" leaving me to enjoy the hours of stress-free driving while listening to the connected iPod! 

This led to my wife and I reminiscing about our youth spent traveling in vehicles with interiors like this! Ahhh.. the days of burning your thighs on the vinyl seats and hands on the door handles!

While we were out there, I of course picked up some work for myself. One of my friends who's Australian and obsessive (does this go together?), handed me 3 of his many laptop computers which have problems of one kind or another. Two of them are the 2 models of the no longer produced ThinkPad X30x series, but one was something new to me. A Sony Vaio SZ series ultra-portables. This one was the SZ650n which is really a very nice machine from the C2D (Core 2 Duo) generation and a very nice machine indeed (although a bit obscure). This series of machine were really feature rich and nicely engineered, but very expensive and sold poorly. It came with Vista which by now is a very old load. it needed a reload of something that wasn't Vista! Of course, Windows 7 is an obvious solution. However, lets just say that finding drivers for an unusual machine, for an operating system it was never designed to run, with slightly obscure hardware isn't straight forward! Yes, the graphics sub-system is a hybrid setup with onboard Intel G31 integrated GPU, coupled with an nVidia GS 8400m stand-alone chip as well. Of course, this weird set-up caused W7 to steadfastly refuse to load anything other than "standard XGA" drivers. The old drivers from Sony's site refused to load because it was for Vista, the W7-64 drivers from nVidia gave an error message for unknown reasons. This led to the use of Google to sort through the huge number of returns to find an acceptable drivers. Finally, this morning; success! I'd be sitting here doing a chair dance if this machine wasn't so dog-slow!!!

Back to the galley now, I suppose.....