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Bringing a Laptop Back From the Dead
By Jonathan | March 2, 2008 at 7:48 pm
In my previous post I talked about how a certain brain lapse of mine caused a sudden and painful death of a certain 6.5 year old laptop. Kevin even took the time to say a few words about my unfortunate experience. It was a sad day, sure, but there is a happy ending. After browsing the Internet and making some phone calls, I was able to find a donor PC on the Black Market. With the particular source that I found, it might have been a case of one laptop tricking another laptop into drinking something, and hours later waking up in a bathtub full of ice…but either way it has a matching blood type (chipset). After some emergency open-heart surgery (processor swapping) and ingesting a few Tylenol to bring down the fever (putting the heat sink back in place) my computer was back on it’s rubber padded feet displaying photos just as planned. Right when you thought all was lost, all was saved and everyone is happy again.
Here is a good processor compared to a bad processor:
As fate may have it, Abi’s old laptop (also 6.5 years old and worthless) used the same chipset as my computer. This meant I was able to simply steal the processor out of her computer and place it [carefully] back in mine. I lost 50MHz in clock speed, but let’s be honest: that is not going to make a difference for what I’m using it for.
Here’s a photo of the current state of my new digital picture frame:
As you can see, I’m missing the frame and any sort of real structure to this thing, but holy crap it works, and it works great! The computer takes a minute or two to boot up, but immediately begins the slideshow. I have a 4GB flash drive in there now (which is pretty much complete overkill) and about 4000 pictures at medium/low quality. Since the LCD screen is only 1024 pixels wide, there’s not really much point in displaying super high quality images. I’ll probably find a smaller flash drive at some point, since I am currently only using about a gig. Pressing ‘Q’ on the keyboard will shut the whole thing off gracefully…not exactly the best and most elegant solution to use the keyboard and all, but I think it will work for now.
Next up: frame it.
Topics: do it yourself, technology | 3 Comments »
March 3rd, 2008 at 4:47 am
NERD! Abi do you still claim him?
March 11th, 2008 at 9:31 am
do not call my laptop worthless
March 11th, 2008 at 9:33 am
cd… you would not call him a nerd if you saw how cool the fram actually is!!!