Out of the Dark......

I was up late last night (I really struggle with time changes), and while working on a few random things like getting my son's old X220 ready for sale, something appeared. OK, I was actually trying to find the X220 drive bay cover and while doing that, I was feeling around to see what was on one of the shelves of my workbench. And out comes this!

I had thought that I'd sold all the random X6x gen machines and parts! Yet, there it was; an X61 sitting on it's matching dock! I kept racking my brain for it's history while I pulled it in and check out whether it even worked. My thought process was rudely interrupted by a sequence of beeps telling me that it either didn't like the RAM, or there was none. A little screwdriver work, followed by some digging in the spare RAM box, and I was rewarded with a POST, followed by a message that it didn't have an OS. That'd be because, it didn't have a drive in it.... More parts box scrounging, which led to me reorganizing my entire stock of 2.5" hard drives..... told you I have trouble with time changes! After that detour, which led to another detour to put a Western Digital Blue 750Gb drive into my son's "new" laptop for "mass storage" purposes..... I came up with an Intel 80Gb, mSATA SSD in the weird 3.3v/1.8" form that I had sitting around. I had, had a number of them at one time because that's what the X300/X301 called for and since they are neither capacious or work in most machines which aren't ThinkPads, they've been collection dust. I'll do a separate post some time on those weird little drives. But in any case, since this was indeed a ThinkPad, and was in need of some sort of drive, I slipped it into a 2.5" adapter and put it in the X61. I invested another 45 minutes of sleep time into slapping an operating system on it to make sure it worked, then went to bed.

The light of day found the hard part rattling around in my head. What exactly does one do with a 8/9 year old laptop? So, let's look at the points of the argument and see what the issues are, OK? It's CPU is a Core 2 Duo T7100, which comes with integrated graphics as well. These are not good things. Not only does it not run current graphics well, it runs hot as well. In fact, this little guy is famous/infamous for running hot! The screen is XGA (1024 x 768). It's not that I'm a widescreen guy or anything, but this low resolution makes most web content which have stuff off to the side creates a scrolling issue! Oh yeah; and lots of that content is in Flash which bogs down older machines like this. Those are pretty big negatives! Are there positives as well?

You can see that, in comparison to a more "normal" sized machine, the X61 is small.... and light, like under 4lbs of light with the BIG, 9-cell battery! That gets really close to 3lbs when you can locate the 6-cell "ghost-battery". Did I mention that I have 2 of those? I think only one still works, but still....... 

After, all that scrutiny, what have I come up with? I think it'd make a great later-day "netbook". Something that a person who writes.... oh, say a Blogger, could just throw in a bag and use as a travel partner. Where most things are sync'd to the Cloud and you wouldn't sweat if it got "jacked". Oh, no, no..... I don't mean me! I don't travel anywhere near as often as I used to, and I don't get paid to blog, so it's not a fit for me. However, it'd be perfect for somebody like that though!

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......

Crossing the Technological Rubicon

It's not often that we get to do something momentus in terms of technology, especially for someone like me who tends to buy after things hit the "sweet spot". In the last post, I talked about upgrading my X300 and having an extra drive as a result. In the post before that, I discussed the demise of the Mushkin Chronos SSD, which is in the process of being RMA'd. Well, I did it again! While in the process of looking at MacBook Pros, then trying to find a Dell E6400 for a friend the other day; I came across a Craigs List ad for an SSD.......new Samsung 256Gb for $100.

Yeah, I know what you're thinking; I was thinking the same thing. SCAM, not really "new", really a refurb, another one of those "penny auction", "I just sold it, but I can tell you where to get one just like it" things. Turns out, it wasn't any of those things. it was being sold be the same guy who was selling the Dell Latitude E6400 that I was buying for my friend. Apparently, he works for/or with Dell and has access to lots of their "sell-off" type stuff. He picked up a bunch of them to use and sell when Dell decided to move on to the new faster SATA-3 standard. I don't know what he paid for them (it must have been great), but I don't really care since $100 for a new 256Gb SSD is a great price in an of itself. Especially because it's a Samsung which is generally considered to be right up there with Intel on reliability. Given that my machine is older and wouldn't see the benefits of SATA-3 anyway, this is pretty awesome. In fact, it turns out that this particular drive is the sell-to-OEM repackaged Samsung 470 that I used in the Viking mini-HTPC build last month. 

So, along with this situation and the RMA'd Chronos returns, I'll have 3 spare SSDs. This puts me in the unique position of being able to move all of my front-line computers to either a single SSD or an SSD boot drive/mechanical storage drive combo with the exception of the file server. That's 5 laptops: 240Gb Sandisk in my wife's T61, 128Gb Samsung in both my X300 and Z61m mobile workstation, 50Gb in my son's Z60t, and 64Gb in the daughter's X61. That's along with a 256Gb + 1Tb in my desktop workstation, 64Gb + 500Gb in the living room HTPC, and 64Gb + 500Gb in the bedroom HTPC. The amazing this is that it wasn't intentional or extravagant, just an almost imperceptible shift in storage medium that's completely changed everything.