Technological Carpe Diem

I'm a terrible person! I had an opportunity so I dump the "love of my life" for another......the X300 for an X301. This is what happened. I had a "contract" in hand for a "new" laptop from one of my old customers (repeat business is awesome). She had just emailed me "out of the blue", stating that she's ready for another computer. The ThinkPad R52 that I sold her 4-5 years ago has been great, but now ready for an updated machine since she's about to start a new degree program this summer. Her needs were the same as before ("Office" type apps, Internet, and a little light photo editing), but she just needed this machine to operate the newer OS (Windows 7, which is what she has at work) and an updated version of Office ....and she had a $300 budget. All that sounded very much like what I do on my X300 which these days sells in the $250 range on a regular basis. So I showed her my machine, which I had upgraded to 4Gb of RAM and a 128Gb SSD vs. the original 2Gb of RAM and 64Gb SSD. We agreed on $285, cleaned up, reloaded with Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit, MS Office 2010 Professional, and ready to go.

So, this is where the Frugal Propellerhead part comes into play. Now, that I knew I had $285 to work with, I needed to find a replacement for the X300. If you've read this blog for any amount of time, you've probably guessed that I've been researching for the possibility of this situation for some time now. First, I didn't just pull the selling price out of my hip pocket. I knew that the X300 routinely sell for somewhere between $200-300, and that's for a "stock" version with either 2 or 4Gb of RAM and a 64Gb SSD (the 128Gb wasn't available at the time it was introduced). So, an upgraded one like mine would be at the top of the range and that's not including Windows 7 OS much less MS Office. So I knew even if my buyer checked on the pricing, I'd keep my reputation as offering a good product at a good price intact. Secondly, I also knew that I could find X301s selling for between $250 and $350. Therefore, if I'm lucky, or good, then I should be able to buy my replacement for around my X300 selling price.

As it turns out; I was lucky AND good. Last week, I was watching a handful of the X301s on eBay of which I quickly narrowed field down to two likely targets. They both had 4Gb of RAM. One had a 128Gb SSD, but the other seemed to be nicer (it's usually hard to tell from eBay photographs). Besides, I had an almost new 128Gb SSD sitting in a drawer. As luck would have it, I missed on the first (128Gb SSD) which sold for about $230, but didn't feel too bad since the second one didn't appear to have many bidders and it ended at an awkward time of the afternoon on a weekday when most people would be at work. It was at something like $185 when I entered a max bid $235 and won it at $200 even! I'm betting that one of the issues was that the seller set the shipping at a rather high $30, but at $230 total, I didn't much care. I got the machine I wanted at a great price.I upgraded and made $55 in the process! The shocker was when I opened the box and found an almost pristine laptop. 

Why did I go through the trouble of all that work to upgrade to a machine that's basically just like the old one? Other than the fact that's it's newer, more powerful while running cooler; it takes DDR3 RAM. That means I can upgrade to 8Gb for less than half the cost of doing it with DDR2 that the X300 takes. Oh...... and I can't afford the X1 Carbon......yet.......

Which leads us to the history lesson. Other than my love for ThinkPads, I love ultra portables. Above you see a stack of them. Starting at the top, you have the PC110, then the 235, 240, the S30, the X301 and finally, the X1 on the bottom. Over the years you can see that they've basically taken the same volume and kind of Pizza-dough'd-it. Actually, only 3 of the 6 have been available here in North America, with the other 3 being "Japan Only" models, but you get the idea. 

I love undersized laptops. It goes back to the first one I ever owned; the great IBM ThinkPad 701 "Butterfly". You know a design is great when it receives a name.....and when it's immediately ensconced in the Museum of Modern Art! That was only the beginning of this obsession.

It was so bad, I even owned the weird "ugly duckling" twins, the ThinkPad 500, and 510c which were really not very good computers but they were fun .....and small.

Some years later when I was already in the mid-sized ThinkPad stage of my computing life with the T2x series, I acquired a 240e through a trade. It was cool, and small (compare it to the FDD that it's attached to), but seriously underpowered by that time.

However you can see by comparison to some of the other machines of that era, how small it really was.

Then came the "X" rated part of my ThinkPad life: beginning with the X20 (that you see depicted here attached to it's "Ultrabase") which was a work acquisition for departmental travel. Over time, I'd own most of the models in that series including the X21, X22, X30, and two X31s, the last of which is still sitting under my desk. In the more modern idiom, I currently have my daughter using an X61.

Of course, ThinkPads don't have a monopoly on ultra portable innovation. There's the amazing Fujitsu "U" Series that are smartphone sized, and Apple with the iconic Macbook "Air" which just beat the X300 to market. However, I'd have to say that probably the company that got there first, with the least (?) is Sony with the X505! This amazing computer came to market almost 5 years before the similar, was thinner than Air (can you say that?) by quite a bit, and essentially had no competitors in the market.

As for me though; I'm not quite ready to give up the admittedly, rarely used optical drive. This in combination with the "must haves" of the famous ThinkPad TrackPoint and other features such as high resolution display, and it's portability make the X301 the right Ultra Portable for me. Well, and a for profit trade-out doesn't hurt either!

 

ThinkPad Therapy

See, it's like this........ When I'm frustrated with something, and I can't resolve the problem to my satisfaction, what I do is to fix something. That generally means a computer, or two..... As you guys know, I've been going round and round with Dell over the charge connector on my son's tablet. So far, the results haven't been very good. So over the course of the last few days, I've resorted to self-medicating! No, not like that!

My form of self-medicating started out with a lavender colored IBM ThinkPad X30. About a year and half ago when my then-four-year-old daughter needed a computer. Unlike my son who wasn't really delivered, but "booted-up", she wasn't as electronics oriented as the boy. So I endeavored to make her first computer more "friendly", when experimenting with a rather large and black ThinkPad A21p didn't go very well. So I found her a small "X Series" machine that had enough power to get her on the internet to play some games, and yet be small and unintimidating. Thus was born the "Princess Edition", X30 that I spent the better part of a week painting to get ready for her birthday that year. Well, time has come and gone, as have Patches and Service Packs, which didn't do the old girl any good. So, a few weeks ago, I breathed some life (screen, SSD, RAM) into a derelict X61 and baby girl got an upgrade. This of course left a $3000+, in year-2002-dollars laptop which runs on a PIII-M! If I was in any way normal, it would have found it's way to the garage to sit in a box till eventually it would be disposed of. 

But No.....that's NOT what frustrated, Frugal Propellerheads do! I already had an X31 base (P-M/1.6) sitting in a cabinet, so why not slap together a knock around laptop. However, it was lavender! Can't be seen running around with a lavender laptops, now can we? So, an hour of sanding time later, it was no longer black. I had for some time watched YouTube videos showing guys (some, more successful than other) painting most anything to look like carbon fiber. Here was the perfect excuse to "give it a go" as our British friends would say. The lid already had been none-too-gently sanded; so what you see here are the results.

I sprayed the entire thing silver, taped on the liner, then sprayed on flat black through the rubber mesh. This is what it looked like after the liner was taken off. As you can see, I made a mistake in not stretching the material flat to eliminate the creases.

In this second picture, I had "fogged" the lid with the flat black and the creases aren't nearly as obvious.

After a second fogging, it's much more uniform, and is now awaiting a "satin" clearcoat.

After the clearcoat, it actually looks pretty good, for a really quick-slapped-together job. Over all, I'm pretty happy with it. Particularly since it was for therapy anyway. So people paint, others do wood-working: I work on computers!
 

 

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......

End of Summer 2012.....

Conceptually yes, but not really..... Today is the last day of summer for me. Tomorrow teachers report for training.

Some of you are probably thinking: It must be rough, being off for 2 months straight! I'm not going to get into the draining aspects of dealing with other human beings (unfinished ones at that), and the need to recharge. I'll just leave it at that we get paid approximately 2/3rds of what other college degree'd professionals in a general sense. It's not a bad job with rough kids in the "Blackboard Jungle" sense.

It's really more like the "Welcome Back, Kotter" version, but with a lot more pressure, 5 Horshacks (504 Behavioral Mods), 3 Vinnies (Special Ed), 5 Washingtons (Cultural/Ethinic performance tracking), and 3 Juan Epsteins (ESL). It isn't 1976 after all.

Most of time, it's really fun, and me being me, teaching world history; it's really a little more like this.

The real downside is that it gives me less time to work on my avocation which as you know is all things technology! Since summer is about to be over, lets take stock on what got done......and (unfortunately), not done.

For the bad, I did not rebuild "Hercules", my Windows Home Server, so that'll be on the agenda as soon as the beginning of school stuff settles down, some time around the end of September. I did not rebuild my daughter's X30 "Sparrow" Princess Edition into an X31, but that will really needs to wait until the garage isn't still 110 degree at 9pm. So I'm thinking, 2nd half of October for that. My personal laptop, the X300 "Raptor", was needed for client work and those times when the desktop workstation was down for upgrades on and off all summer. That'll be a VERY short and quick project, so I'm thinking over the weekend some time in the next couple of weeks. I also managed to acquire ANOTHER project during the summer, which is a T61 for my wife, who now would like a second laptop because her new school district has desktops. So, the Z61 will need a reload, and her personal stuff needs to be moved over to the T61 which I intend on installing a SSD. That'll probably be some time in the second half of September when I get enough money to buy another SSD.

That sounds like a lot didn't get done, which is pretty bad! Well, actually, just as much good occurred, but much of it was unexpected which pushed everything back. The most important was that I ended up with a LOT more computer work over the summer than expected. That's good for the bank account, but not as much for personal projects! 

So what were the good results then? At the beginning of the summer, there were two things that if asked, I would have put on a "wish list", and that was a backup DSLR and a tablet. Well....it came to pass that I was able to buy a backup DSLR for my system: the amazing "Plastic Fantastic" with 28-80mm/f3.3-5.6 "G" spec lens.....couldn't be happier. At almost the same time, I bought a broken ThinkPad Android Tablet. WHAT? How does that accomplish anything? Be patient and soon (fingers crossed) and all will be revealed in a future post. Moving on, the main laser printer was upgraded from a LaserJet 4000 to 4100, and as detailed in the last post, the "Blackbird" was upgraded, then upgraded again to what I believe will be it's final version which I would expect to last at least two years. 

It sounds like I didn't get an awful lot done and in some ways made more work for myself, but I don't mind. Some years ago when I made the decision to go back to teaching and not continue my IT career, it was a good call for me. I love teaching, and working on technology part-time helps me love it even more, since I can keep my mind off of the stress of that profession as well as maintain my love for the other.

It's Summer!

Well; it's not actually not quite summer yet, but it's close enough. Close enough for a Frugal Propellerhead to plan for the summer. For a teacher, summer means quite a bit more time on our hands to do what we want, and of course for me, that would mean working on all things having to do with computers, home audio AND photography. Unfortunately that can also mean spending money, lots of it and that's something that can't happen. So a satisfying Propellerhead summer takes a little planning.

First of all, we need to take a look at what needs to be done, then we can talk about how to deal with that in planning. First of all, my daughter's custom lavender ThinkPad X30 is a little long-in-the-tooth. It specs out as a PIII (Tualatin) processor with 1Gb of RAM running XP! Although the size, and operating system is fine for her, the hardware is past due for an update. Fortunately, the X30 is built on the same chassis as the X31 which was a whole generation (if not more) forward in technology. It's built on the Pentium "M" (Banias) platform which completely skipped the hot running P4 series. Being built on the same chassis, I can simply move the lavender lid/screen assembly straight over. I will have to repaint a new keyboard bezel which was a different part, but that's not a big deal. Maxing the RAM out to a full 2Gb will have Katie all set for another couple of years! 

The trick here is that I didn't wait to buy it this summer when I have the time. Several months ago, I came across an ad for an X31 barebones-"base" (w/o LCD assembly) on the ThinkPad Forum for a song....so I bought it and stuck it in a cabinet.

 A few months ago I started seeing 128Gb, 1.8" SSDs selling for a very low price ($125). I was working on my "Ark" project at the time and bought one for it; then I started thinking about it and realized that I should probably pick up another one to upgrade my X300 since the load on it was getting a little old and would need a reload soon anyway. This second 128Gb SSD actually came in at just below $100 so into the cabinet it went as well. 

 Around that same time, the next generation of Sandforce SSD controllers came out and I ran across a special on the 128Gb Mushkin Chronos SSD for less than the price that I gave for the 60Gb Mushkin Callista SSD a little over a year ago. 

 The next project waiting in the wings is a Windows Home Server 2011 upgrade from the original WHS that I'm running now. I can't really claim good planning for this one, but rather it's the result of good fortune! I was having an email discussion with my brother last week about some projects that he's been working on and he described several machines that he's upgrading from the older Intel socket 775 line to the more current "Sandybridge" i3/i5/i7s. One of these project was a WHS 2011 machine, so I replied by telling him about the WHS file server that I cobbled together from free and traded-for parts. The upshot is that he offered to send me his left-over 775 boards, CPUs and misc parts! Although, the socket 775 may seem old to him, it's plenty new enough for me, and with a dual core processor on board, I'll be able to upgrade to the WHS 2011 as well since it's a 64-bit operating system. 


He also sent me a few other parts which have gone into upgrading the my XP computer, my regular workstation as well as the HTPC which will be receiving the 60Gb SSD that was in the workstation. So; things are lining up to be a busy summer ahead!