Plastic Fantastic Goes To Work!

Yesterday could have been a hellish time of misery, but I was able to do a lot with the situation. As usual for the summer, we had plans to go to Six Flags; you know...."More flags, more fun"!?! The kids had accumulated enough Accelerated Reader points to earn tickets, so we planned to take them, but this time, we were not only taking our two, but Josh's friend Wyatt as well as his older sister. After looking at the situation, we were going to have 4 kids, so if you add two adults, that number doesn't fit in any of our vehicles! Beside which, the wife had plans to go to a teacher (mostly elementary) store with some of her teacher friends, so I bit the bullet and volunteered to take the kids myself. Me, 4 children between the ages of 6 and 13 at Six Flags over Texas in late July! Hey it only got up to 98! 

What a great opportunity! Time to get out the "Plastic Fantastic", D50 that had arrived last week and have it fulfill it's destiny in camera life. Hazardous, yet need to be physically light, photographic duty. On top of that, I had a very compact, very plastic, and very cheap Tamron 28-200mm zoom that supposedly didn't work which needed to be field tested as well. There you have it, "new" (to me) camera, problematic lens, iffy lighting, fast moving subjects, and adverse conditions.....what could be better!

Let me start by saying that it was an unadulterated joy to carry that sub-two-pound camera/lens combo compared to my usual D300! It's not only light, but much more compact, so that I wasn't constantly worried about slamming it's mass and bulk into something (or someone). This camera fits my hands very well. Although I have smallish hands; I do have rather long fingers, so really small gear feels uncomfortable to me. No, I didn't shoot any Pulizer Prize worthy images, but it (and the lens) did do a creditable job. 

In some semblance of order, lets start with the lens. It's one of the early autofocus "Superzooms", by the inventor of the category, Tamron. A 28-200mm f3.5-5.6, it's generally not considered to be one of the better examples of the type in this day and age. It's also one of the older type that is "screw-drive" vs. ring-motor self-driven that is common today. It was listed by the seller as unable to auto-focus, meaning that it "hunts" and won't lock on to anything. And sure enough, when it showed up, I tried it out on the D70s I had at the time and it had all kinds of trouble locking on anything. I also tried it with the D300 and didn't seem to do much better. So it went into the cabinet for the next 3 months to await my ultimate decision on disposition. Last week, when the D50 arrive, the urge struck me to give it another try since I was still waiting patiently for a "G" spec, Nikkor 28-80mm/f3.3-5.6 appear at the right price on eBay. The upshot was that it actually seemed to lock on subjects with regularity on the D50, so it went to Six Flags yesterday! Well.....guess what......it worked just fine, probably 95% of the time! There were a couple of instances where the subject was dark enough that it couldn't lock on, so I had to switch to manual, but otherwise it was fine. No, it isn't a terribly sharp lens, but it was something like $17 after shipping!

Moving on to the D50 camera itself; all I have to report is that there's nothing to report. It simply did everything it was suppose to do, when it was suppose to do it and how most any photographer would want it done. I LOVE the compact, light easy handling aspects of this body! When I was weighing my options, I had thought about possibly a D40 as well, but in retrospect, I don't think I'd have been as happy with the body that would have been TOO small in my hands, and a control layout that's completely different than the D300 as well as my previous Nikon DSLRs (D70, D70s, D200). All the Nikon DSLRs up until the D40 has had an LCD control panel to the right of the pentaprism housing, where-as the D40 did away with that entirely and moved all those functions to the back LCD. This and the fact that it used a different battery and lacks the capability to focus old "screw-drive" lens would have made it very alien to my system. Sure, I'd have loved for the D50 to use compact flash, but I can live with having a different set of memory cards for all the pluses that it offers me. I'm certain that I'll find other things that'll annoy, me, but for now, I couldn't be happier with this camera!

I returned from Six Flags to find a little box, which contained the "G" spec Nikkor 28-80mm/f3.3-5.6, that I was able to nab on eBay during the weekend for.......$29! And indeed, everything that I had read about it was correct: it is in fact, VERY compact and light. I wished it had arrived early enough for me to take to the amusement park, but even that served the purpose of finding the Tamron to be at least partially working and a now a candidate to be sold for profit. 

The last point I want to touch on today is the comparison between the D300 and the D50. Hopefully the picture can give you some sense of the difference, although it's difficult to tell until you see both together and more importantly to hold them. Sure, the D50 isn't the "baby D3" that the D300 has often been called, but at about five-eights scale and half the carry weight, I think it's going to be great at what I want it to do! They do make a very good match for each other and should work very well as a team.

When It Rains.....It Pours!

I know that people tend to use this little phrase in a negative sense, but this is a case where the opposite is true. A few posts ago (In "Milk Run") I wrote about picking up an underpriced 2010 MacBook with the funds that I had accumulated from doing some misc. computer work. Of course I'm not in the process of a switch to Mac, but I'm more than happy to take advantage of the Mac-Lovers out there, by making money off of them! In this case, I ended up selling the cleaned-up (in a physical as well as computer sense of the word) for $500! Yup, I doubled my money (more or less) in 2 weeks. 

  At this point, things started coming together. First I came across a D50 that the seller seemed to think that there was something wrong with: he stated that it would occasionally "not focus" giving an R07 error. After a little bit of research, I found that this wasn't an error, but the camera telling the user that it's in the process writing the images from the buffer to the memory card and there are 7 images left to write! While this is happening, the camera won't do anything else, including trying to focus. I got it for $91 (shipping included), so the "back-up/hazardous duty" camera has been acquired. Pretty closely thereafter came the Tablet.....

 Several months ago, I got involved in examining the market for tablets at the prompting of a friend, of course, I had come across the ThinkPad offering at that time, but dismissed it because it was in the "nose-bleed" $650+ area that's clearly aimed at the business end of the market. However, it was essentially a ThinkPad version of what a tablet should be, with excellent IPS/Gorilla Glass hi-res screens (1280 x 800) and built-in Pen input capability. What one reviewer said sums it up suscintly: "What your IT department would design a tablet to be". A few days ago, there appeared on eBay the high-end (64Gb) version "As Is" for $200 with a "make offer" option. After a little back and forth with the seller, it was found that the tablet won't power on, but.......still under warrantee TILL NOVEMBER! Holy Cats! I offered him $150, which he took, so I'm chomping at the bit waiting for this thing to show up so I can send it in to Lenovo for repairs. 

Which leads in to a rarely discussed grey area. That of buying products known to be "not working", but still under warrantee. This can be a tremendous technique for saving and/or getting an otherwise overly expensive product. But it's not without problems. First of all, there is every possibility that you'll find that the item has been broken due to some user error that voids the warranty. Secondly, it often requires a LOT of research to ascertain whether it's even eligible for repairs under warranty anyway. In this case, I was able to find this out because I'm very familiar with ThinkPad support (which the seller was not). Then comes the really tricky part. In the process of messaging back and forth, you have to figure out whether the seller is being honest about his selling the product. Whether this was really something he just broke or in this case, part of a "mixed lot" of corporate "cast-offs" that he picked up. A quick look at his "other items" for sale indicated that it was the later reason. So, I decided that I'm willing to bear the risk of getting it repair under warranty (or not) for $150 which is what I offered and he accepted. Typically, these are not IT guys and want to just sell off as quickly as possible so they can do it all over again. 

 The last thing was the "Plastic Fantastic", or 28-80mm f3.3-5.6 "G" lens which I had previously written about as the perfect pairing with the light and compact D50. Virtually all the professional reviews I've seen of it rave about it's performance being all out of proportion with it's weight, size and cost. I had found that it can often be found under $50, but last night, I scored one for under $30, after shipping! This was probably because of the auction ending at the awkward time of just after midnight central time, regarless......I'm happy!

The upshot is that, all-in-all, for about $280, I was able to score three of the items on my "wanted" lists by spending just a little bit more than the profit I made from "flipping" the MacBook. Yup, this there is going to require more writing after I use them for a while, but I'm sure looking forward to that!

You Win Some....and You Lose Some

I really hate losing, but sometimes it happens and you have to give in and decide to stop throwing time away. I had a client who a few years ago bought an IBM ThinkPad R52 from me and he (mostly his family) have been rough on their machines. They have 4 of my machines and one HP desktop that I rebuilt for him in their house.....and they have to have the OS rebuilt on a regular basis. A week ago, he brought me the two ThinkPads, one of which had a simple WiFi settings issue that I resolved and sent right back, but the other "blue-screened" immediately on Windows start up. "No big deal", I thought; I can just pull the drive, connect it to one of my USB adapters and pull the files off. Then I'll put it back in and reload the OS from restore disks.....no fuss, no muss. 

That was the plan anyway. Several days, and twice as many different data recover utilities later, the drive steadfastly refused to mount....on any computer. So I put it in the (previously) fail-safe backup, which is to use a ThinkPad drive adapter that fits in their UltraBay. I don't know why that one always worked; maybe it give the drive a little more voltage, but that failed too! Down to the last straw, I put it in the freezer over night and gave that old technique a try. Still no joy. So, I'm going to write it off as a mystery since I don't hear anything physically wrong with it like rattling or even the dreaded clicking.

Now, on to the "Win Some" part. NO, that's not a bigger picture of the bad drive, it's a 500Gb Travelstar. I've always coveted these big drives, but never could pull the trigger on one given their price and my lack of real need for one. But the other day, I was having to go up to the Carrollton suburb of Dallas to pick up that $99 HP desktop for our friends as well as a copy of OS X "Snow Leopard" to restore the MacBook when I came across and ad for one of these for $40 on Craig's List. I texted the guy and promptly forgot about it. A few hours later he texted me back to say that he still had it, but someone was going to buy it, so I offered him $35 and asked him to call me if his buyer didn't materialize. I was in Irving which is the far side of Dallas. Anyway, while I was up in Carrollton running around picking stuff up, he calls to say that I can have the drive for $35 and that he'd meet me on my way home: BONUS! Sometimes you see things on CL that are great deals, but it's not worth the time and gas to go get it at the various far-flung parts of the Metro-plex. 

 On the way home, I swung in to Mesquite and picked up one of the many Dell Latitude D6x0 Series machines that I've sold. This was a computer that I recently had to completely rebuild and move to an new base, because the client dropped it while it was running! Well, I got it back to him the other day, but he called me back to say that after that first time at McDonald's, he could never get it to connect again via WiFi. So I got it home and did the usual things to it like going with a different connection manager (Dell vs. Windows), dumped and reload drivers, but still no go. I did notice that it was hanging on to a weird IP that it was using with the Ethernet. So I surmised that it was having an issue with TCP/IP. Sure enough, after a little bit of Googling, I came across a post of somebody talking about a corruption in the TCP/IP stack that was messing up Winsockets. I hadn't heard Winsockets since the Windows 3.11 days when you had to load and set that up yourself! So I had it do a rebuild (using DOS) and it magically fixed the problem. 

On a side note, the Snow Leopard disk I picked up was used to clear and reload the MacBook I bought in the pawn shop and is now listed on Craig's List for twice what I paid for it. I guess I should have really called this post, Win Some and Lose One. Still hate losing any though.....

"Milk Run" to "Pawn Star": Mac Style

Here's a quick little post that really illustrates how great computer deals can be found anywhere. Yesterday, I had just delivered a laptop rebuild for a client that had dropped (while on) his Dell D620 and cracked the base, killed the fan and hard drive. So it was largely a "labor" job. I had a replacement hard drive on hand, so I just had to buy a base and fan. 

So the upshot of it was that I had $115 burning a hole in my pocket and a task to buy milk........ "What the H*#@*#L!!!".....milk? We routinely go to Braum's for milk, which is not only cheaper, but don't feed their herd hormones to up production, plus the kids are in favor of the ice cream that they have there. But we don't have a Braum's, so it involves going to a neighboring town which has a pawn shop that I like nose around at (although I've never bought anything there). On the way out, I spotted a gleaming while Mac. I saw that it was marked at a surprising $250. So on a lark, I asked to see it, since even older iBooks (G4) typically sell between $350 and $450. Much to my surprise, it wasn't an iBook, but a MacBook! Now my knowledge of the various Mac models is pretty general and not anywhere near that of PCs, so I tried to call my Mac-loving/Mac-user brother-in-law, but he didn't answer. I knew enough to suspect that it was pretty new and look up the "About the Mac" utility and did the "oh-so-modern" thing of snapping a picture with my phone. Later after I left when my brother-in-law called me back, he told me that the serial number should be in the pic that I took and if I plugged it into the right place on the Apple support site, it would tell me what that machine was. 

It turned out to be a 2 year old, "Late 2010" MacBook! Although the "plain-Jane" version, the typical worth seems to be currently somewhere between $750 and $900! You want to bet that I scrounged up every nickel I had and ran right back there and bought it!?! I'll probably have to spend $30 and buy disks to do a complete reload, but GOOD GRIEF! I should be able to easily double my investment on this thing!

I feel like I've just been in an episode of "PAWN STARS"; the East Texas spin-off that is!!!

Desktops Are Worthless.....

That should be expected of someone who has a family of 4 working on 5 ThinkPads, doesn't it? Actually, what I should say that desktops are "worth......LESS", and not worthless. Maybe it reflects my old guys computer experience from way-back of working on them in the IBM PC-AT/XT days, but we have 3 (not counting servers) desktop computers in the house and it's about to become 4! OK, 1 and some time soon it'll be 2 are actually HTPCs, but of course they are really desktops that just don't sit on or under a desk. 

So, what do I mean; desktops are worth less then? For those who don't haunt Craig's List or looking at the desktop listings on eBay OR have been given any number of old machines by people because they heard that you are a "computer guy", then you might not be aware. Aware of what? Aware that the market for desktop computers and computer parts is ridiculously low or non-existent! 

Which gets me to why a guy like me would also have a desktop workstation. Other than the fact that the parts are so amazingly cheap for the kind of power you get, there are just some things that notebook computers don't do very well. One is the ever-present issue of file storage. Yes, I do in fact have a 4Tb+ home server for that, but I'm not talking about archival storage, I'm talking about temporary storage that is essential when you do a lot with media like photo, video and music. The fact is, that mechanical storage for notebooks runs twice what it is for desktop. The other issue is, you can't just throw a bunch of drives in a case, so you end up with USB 2.0 which is waaay sloooowww! My other issue goes back to working with media as well. It's all fine and good to web-surf or do anything text-based with a 15" or even 17", but to do anything effective, you really need at least a 20" monitor and in my case, one 22" WUXGA (1920 x 1200), one 20" UXGA (1600 x 1200), plus another WXGA+ (1440 x 900) display when I need it. Try that with a notebook computer of any kind! 

But it's not my desktop that got me going for this post, but some friends of ours who came home from a camping trip last week to find that they'd experienced a surge which killed half the outlets of their "surge protector", along with everything plugged into them. So, after looking at their situation, it was obvious that replacing the fried power supply of their 10 year old (socket 423, P4) Gateway wouldn't have been very efficient use of money. I told them that my guess would be that they could replace it with a MUCH newer MUCH faster machine for about $100-120. And my standing rule of thumb on electronics is to replace anything where the costs will be close to half of replacement. So as part of this conversation, I started doing research on the usual suspects of eBay and Craig's List. Thirty minutes later, I had confirmed my suspicion that with $100-150 in hand and some patience, anyone could get into a relatively powerful and a MUCH more up-to-date desktop computer. 

Specifically, if you want a fairly powerful socket 775 or AM3 dual core computer capable of running Windows 7 well, you can go one of two routes. There's the preferable (at least to me) route of finding a "generic" computer with nice components, but people who build these things tend not only to know what they are doing, but the worth of what they have, so these machines usually to sell for around $250. And although, they are typically worth every penny (and more), but it's not the price-point that our friends would be comfortable with at the moment. The second route would be the "name-brand manufacturer" build (such as HP, Dell, etc.). The fact of the matter is that because they sell so many that they surplus in the thousands at a time from large entities like, school, corporations, and the government. This drives the price down to half of what the specs would otherwise indicate. A good example would be an HP DC7700 workstation class machine equipped with a socket 775 MB, Intel E6300 Core 2 Duo CPU, 2Gb of RAM, 160Gb hard drive......all for $99! Really! I can take a another $100 and really heat this thing up, but it'll do fine as a family computer just as it sits. 

 

The important thing here is the Core 2 Duo fitted to the Intel socket 775. That particular socket started back in the "Prescott" P4 days. We want the later versions with a chipset AFTER the 8xx era (in general) so that it'll not only physically accept, but RUN the latest Core 2 Duo CPUs. If you are a regular "family" type user, there's nothing that you'll do that the newer C2D processors can't. AND this socket will even take the quad core ones as well. Just give it plenty of RAM! 

Now, another thing to watch out for. Take a close look at the image of the run-of-the-mill HP/Compaq business computer above. No....I did not flip the image. Remember when I said that I'd rather purchase a "generic" built computer? The reason is that the large manufacturers for whatever reason like to use parts customized to their specifications for their production purposes, such as  a weird power button header, odd drive mounts, unusual power supplies and worse of all, a non-standard MB layout. Many Dell, Gateway, Lenovo, and HP desktops use a board layout called BTX (which is backward versus ATX which is standard), so if you ever want to replace it with a newer board...you're out of luck! So, look for one with a normal layout such as some Dell Vostros and HP DCs. The other is if you are lucky enough to live near a metropolitan area or have a friend who does, then run a search on eBay for that area. Why? Desktops are heavy and it's expensive to ship them. PLUS make certain that you find a dealer that is OK with a  "local pickup" (message them and check), some of them jack up their shipping and handling (S&H) price to make more profit and don't allow pickups. That $100 whiz-bang desktop doesn't look like such a good deal with $40+ of S&H tacked on to it! 

In the end, I'll probably get them that HP which is located in a nearby suburb being sold by a dealer that's already told me he's OK with a "local pickup". That E6300 is a Core 2 Duo processor running at !.86ghz built on the 45nm process making it a pretty cool running CPU. A 160Gb drive is plenty for them, and since this machine is new enough to have SATA ports, throwing in bigger drives later will be easy. I checked and the MB has the PCIe slot necessary for them to put on higher powered video cards down the road as well. 

What a great (and cheap) way to go....as long as you aren't a gamer that is!