... So They Loaded Up The Truck and Moved To... Terrell!?!

Although this image is from the remake, those of you who grew up in the late 60's and early 70's will remember the Clampetts well! The reruns would be on the TV virtually every day during my childhood and of course the opening credits played with the scene of the family moving to "Beverly; Hills... that is...". That is exactly what I feel like right now as we're in the countdown till the big move next week. We finally have the closing dates for ours and the house we're buying nailed down (sort of) and are scheduling the move date. So, what am I up to?

This of course... well duh! Yup, less than a month before we head back to school. We teachers have less time than that. So yes indeed: we are walking the tightrope of prepping for school (both for ourselves and the kids) while moving to a new home. It's a little stressful....

 

This time is a little different than the previous 7 in that my son Josh is headed to middle schools (grades 7 and 8 here). I taught that age group for much of my career so I'm well aware of all the issues, so that part isn't so bad. Besides, I'm just down the street at the high school and he'll be in a school staff by my former colleagues. I do have to get ready for a one issue though. Perversely; from a technology standpoint, our school district is much better prepared to deal grades 5 and 6 as they issue those kids the Dell Latitude 2100.

True: it's not the most advanced notebook ever with it's 10" screen and Atom processor, but it was rugged and came with 2Gb of RAM. No I'm not joking. That 2Gb is FAR superior than the 1Gb they put in the ThinkPad X200 that they bought for the high school and don't get me started on the 512Mb that was spec'd for the X61 of the middle school machines!!! It's so bad that the majority of the students don't check out school machines any more, preferring to BYOT (Bring Your Own Technology), or the most prevalent solution, use a smartphone. You can imagine what that does for efficiency when they have to actually have to do something productive; oh like type a paper.... 

 

You're probably thinking: "surely your son has a notebook computer", and of course, he does and has had since he was 4 or 5. In fact, he's now on his 5th or 6th generation of notebooks, having started with an A22p and most recently using a T500. Which gets me to my story. If you're the least bit familiar with that 15.1", 6+ pound machine you'll understand that it's a wonderful "workhorse" computer eminently suitable for the combo school work-Minecraft job it had been doing..... while sitting immobile on his desk. However, the concept of having a slightly built 12-year old packing it to and from school daily in a backpack probably isn't an ideal solution. At first I considered moving him to a smaller-lighter-slightly derelict T400 I have sitting around, but really; it isn't that much smaller and lighter. "What to do", says the propellerheaded dad?

The obvious solution is to buy another computer, right? You guys know me too well! In this case, there's more to it than my losing battle with TAS (Technology Acquisition Syndrome), but hey; we all have our little issues, right? Anyway; lets look at the decision matrix. Starting with the fact that school desks are NOT any bigger than when you and I went to school with nothing more than paper and pencils. Despite what the politicians would like you to believe, they are not building the schools any different than they used to. Sure, they add projectors, some Ethernet jacks and a WiFi AP in each room, but the rooms themselves are the same. As in the same size, with the same sized desks in there, with more students by the way (but that's another issue altogether). So you have a desk surface with the same size that they used to have, but the students are expected to have a notebook computer AND paper and pencil on there as well! Which gets us back to the original issue with the model of computer. If you compare the actual difference between the T500 and T400 side-by-side, there's not that much to give between them. Sure the T400 feels lighter, but the reality is that even the "S" model isn't that much better. Solution? You're lookin' at it..... The X-Series of ThinkPad! These machines were designed from the ground up to be "sub-notebooks" meaning between 3 and 4 pounds of carry weight, and a footprint based on a 12" screen. I kind of already knew this as my experience with them go back to the original X20 way back in my IT days in Chicago. In fact, I've owned every model between the X2x, X3x, X4x, X6x, and up to the X30x that have been my personal machine before the current X1. However, my detour through the X300/301/X1 had left me in the bigger screened branch of the line and have forgotten about the 12" machines since the demise of my daughter's X61. At this time, I'm not going to regale you with the process of deciding between relatively recent 12" models, but will simply say that I ended up at a working X220 at $59, but missing parts.

If you haven't read my old stuff before or I haven't made my point: here's the deal. These are ABSOLUTELY, the notebook computers to target!!! Let's start with that it was $59..... less than $80 after shipping. It was missing the A/C adapter, hard drive, drive bay cover, but had the critical battery! It was missing everything I had and mostly didn't want and had the one relatively expensive piece to replace. The X220 is the "Sandy-bridge" i5/2520m core version of these machines and is only 2 generations off of being current. Additionally, the 4Gb of RAM it did have was in the form of 1 module, giving me the ability to simply put in another to max it out to 8Gb (which I did immediately). The missing hard drive was going to get pulled and replaced with a 120Gb Intel 330 SSD out of his old machine anyway. Oh yeah, least I forget that I had to spend $1.96 to buy a drive-bay cover. Woe is me! Need I say that I have a drawer full of ThinkPad A/C adapters and that he'll be able to go anywhere in the house without having to move one. And since his and my schools have both been equipped with ThinkPads for years, there'll be A/C adapters everywhere! This might very well be the slickest upgrade I've done in years!

 Now that I'm feeling good about myself..... 

 

The Mac Came Back

Three years ago (this month) I wrote a blog-post about a foray into Macs, and I don't mean British for a raincoat. As a quick recap, I had a client who's daughter was going to school at Baylor University, a school that's known for it's medical programs and was/is a "Mac Shop". Therefore, she wanted to have a MacBook just to make things easier. Well; earlier this year, she graduated, and while I was doing some work for them, I asked about the computer and whether she was upgrading now that she's gainfully employed. Some time later, the dad told me that she had indeed upgraded since, a few months ago, she had spilled a soft drink into the computer and it had promptly died! ..... and that I could have it if I liked. 

So, of course I liked; you know me.... I enthusiastically welcomed the rather bedraggled looking MacBook back home. And it absolutely looked like the proverbial thing that "the cat dragged in", with NO signs of life emminating from it when power was hooked up.

Let's began by looking at the specs. It's a "run-of-the-mill" 2009 White polycarbonate MacBook, which back then cost about $1000 in base trim. This particular machine had been upgraded to it's RAM max of 4Gb vs. the 2Gb standard so was worth more. In 2011 when I originally bought it, they were going in the $500 range. I picked it up for somewhat less than that with 6 months of Apple Care left to go. In those pre-"Core" days, it was a very nice machine. Today, given that it's equipped with the "Penryn" (45nm) generation Core 2 Duo, it's still a very useable computer, especially with 4Gb (or more) of RAM. The main chink in the armor though is the slow 160Gb/5400rpm hard drive. More on that later. 

So, what we have here was what used to be a pretty nice little laptop, but had been rendered useless from soda. Now, when you have a liquid spill, typically, everything doesn't die. If it's water or a few other things, sometimes, the entire machine can be rescued if power is removed and the liquid is flushed away and dried quickly. NONE of those things happened. It was a worse case scenario. Soda (acid AND sugar), NOT flushed away quickly. So the upshot is that the motherboard and in all likelihood any electronics in the base of the machine are irretrievable. However, it wasn't a lost cause. In all probability, the entire screen assembly was/is still good, maybe the drives, and possibly the RAM. The question was: how much work did I want to invest into this little laptop?

Two weeks of pondering and eBay watching netted me this. At $83 with free shipping, plus my conveniently timed "eBay Bucks" certificate brought this solution in at less than $70 spent. To make a long story shorter; it arrived yesterday afternoon, and an hour later, I had a working MacBook. The important thing about this was that the base was complete/working, only missing a few screws. So the old screen went right in, the RAM and hard drive transferred right over, the machine booted right up. End of story.... kind of....

During those two weeks of looking and contemplation, I decided that if I was going to resurrect this machine, I was going "whole hog". And in my world, that means SSD. As I've trumpeted many times before; nothing makes a machine feel fast as quickly as putting an operating system on an SSD! To that end, I bought a used Intel 160Gb SSD for $90, which brought total outlay to just under $160. I'll need to watch Craigslist and find somebody selling an OS X Snow Leopard, or Mountain Lion (maybe even Mavericks) load and get it finished for something like $175 invested. If that seems like a lot of money, it is, especially when compared to similarly spec'd Dell E6400s that I often pick up for between $100 and $125. But, equipped with an SSD, I'll be able to sell this machine for more than double what I put into it. That's the upside of Macs; they may be more expensive, but they have a higher resale value as well. In this case, somewhere between $300 and $400...... that's IF I sell it at all!

WHAT!!! Have I turned to the dark side!?! No, not yet, although I am carrying an iPhone these days (long story). Some time ago, my daughter's ThinkPad X61 died. I replaced it with a Z61t, but she rarely uses it since it's slower AND she's been using an iPad as well. ......Yes, we've succumbed to what my brother-in-law calls, the "gateway drug" of iOS. In fact, we have 4, count 'em, 4 iPads in our house these days! No, I don't use one. AND No, I'm not writing about this now! Back to the sad little girl without a laptop. Anyway; she's always been the different child, the happy bouncy one, the artistic one, .....the lefty. I've always thought that she'd be a Mac person when she got older. She's older now, so it might be time to move her over to a Mac. 

Why not me? Actually, I'm probably a perfect candidate to be a Mac guy. A little different than most people. Kind of a hardware snob. .....and I might..... at some point. There's been a number of times that I've come close to picking up one of the black MacBooks from the same generation as the one I just fixed. And if the 2011, black MacBook Air would have come to fruition, I'd of probably been done for, but neither happened. I do think though, that when the time comes to retire my trusty ThinkPad X301, it'll come down to the X1 Carbon, or an MBA (black or no black). 

Propellerhead Gear: Winter 2014

It's done...... that which will become known as the Great Rebuild of Winter 2013-14 is finally finished! Here I sit drinking coffee when I should be at work and contemplating my existence, while listening to the sounds of a happy hard drive working to back up a computer. It's the completed "Spectre" backing up the rebuilt "Blackbird". Last night, I finally figured out what was wrong with the HighPoint Caching RAID controller, and got it up and running. Let me just say this about HighPoint: great concepts, good hardware..... terrible instructions and support!

If you are "of a certain age", you'll remember the Japanese models of the 1970s. Superb quality, enough to put AMT, Revell, and Monogram to shame, but they were not for the faint of heart. Not very good instructions to say the least! This is what it's like to work with HighPoint products. You're going to have to figure it out yourself.

...But hey, I could be out there in this instead. I almost forgot; I'm home this fine Monday morning instead of at work, because we had yet another ice storm. Yup, high ground temperature, rapidly plunging temps and precip, makes great ice around these parts. Combine that with the modern inability to drive in inclement weather makes for an extra holiday. Well, not really. We'll have to make the day up later, but that'll be in June, so I worry about that later.

In the meantime, that which rarely happens, has come to pass. All of our "frontline" computers are "up-to-date". My son and daughter are on freshly loaded (within 3 months) machines. The son on his mother's hand-me-down 15.4" widescreen T61 and daughter on a Z61t which replaced the dead X61. Both of them have 64Gb SSDs in them, running Windows 7 SP1 and will be for the foreseeable future since they don't need much storage (especially now that the server is up). AND Windows 8 is the Vista of this age, so no OS upgrade anytime soon.

Can I just say that I'm reveling in the current state of my wife's bliss? You know.....Happy Wife, Happy Life!?! After her recent upgrade to the ThinkPad T500 which is the F35 "Lightning II" on our network, and last week's tablet upgrade from iPad2 to iPad Air. 

The whole thing went very well and is an excellent example of Craigslist at work. As soon as I was given a clearly defined edict to get an iPad Air, I had the parameters necessary to do my job. Although, it being an current Apple product, which meant that there wouldn't be any sort of "great deal" to be found, I could maximize my resources. I knew the 32Gb iPad Air (henceforth to be called the IPA), retails for $599 and even the most aggressive discounts would only bring it down to $560. Don't ya just love Apple? Early adopters/buyer's remorse folks, selling on CL typically price the 16Gb for somewhere over $400, usually around $450. However, after reading several reviews, it was apparent that the current prevailing wisdom is to bypass the 16Gb model since the newer apps have all blown-up due to graphics optimized for the Retina display. ....And since this was Momma's vs. a kid device, prudence would dictate buying the higher spec unit. While looking for the "new" unit for her, I went ahead and listed the old generation 1 iPad that the daughter had been using, on CL as well (Cascade works on tablets too) at the $150 that we paid for it. On Thursday, I found a new, still in plastic 32Gb, IPA for $530. When you factor in the $45 or so tax savings, plus the $30 savings from the lowest retail price; it's a rather substantial $75 off of store price and $115 off of "retail". Yeah, I jumped all over it! The following day, the 1G sold at $150 making the cost of upgrade $380!  

On my end of things (now that my wife is squared away), the Raptor, otherwise known as ThinkPad X301 is running great! The switch over to the Intel 320 (X18) hasn't just been seamless, it's been an upgrade with a the few glitches that I'd occasionally experience completely gone, and it running very smoothly. The Blackbird, of course you know about due to ealier posts. Plus, both HTPCs (Viking and Hawkeye) also got SSD upgrades and fresh OS reloads.

What brought on this bout of introspection? This. I ran across an ad for 2 HP "Blackbird" 002 cases. This machine came on the market around the time that I built my first version of the Blackbird. It was one of those thing that major manufacturers go through periodically just to show everyone that they didn't just build office machines and junk sold at Wal-Buy. It was pretty amazing, with high-end everything and even water-cooling to boot. Dell did something similar are that time in their XPS line. Of course, neither went anywhere in the market and therefore became "one-offs", but hey, that doesn't mean they weren't cool. I've occasionally thought I'd like to build in one of these cases, but at the $300 that the guy was wanting, it only reinforced that the frugal-way is the best way for me. As I sit here with my file server doing it's first full backup on the workstation; both machines together don't break the $1000 barrier!