  Laptop Surgery Well, today was definitely fun and exciting. Marti's friend Gabi (Gabriella) came over today, bringing her sick laptop with her.
I don't want to know HOW, but somehow she managed to fubar the floppy drive. And with the new drive in hand, in that typical Compaq shipping box, and her Compaq Presario 700 in the other, she brought the patient to the surgery table. Let me start by saying I highly DISLIKE Compaq laptops. The same holds true for Hewlett-Packard laptops, since they are now the same.
They do have their purpose - they fill in the "cheap but good" market - if you take care of them, they will last. If not, well, you get what happened to Gabi's - something fubar. It has to do with their construction, being that though they are heavyweights, coming in over 6 lbs, they still feel like they'd break if I blew on it.
It just does not have that sturdy feel that I generally find in the laptops I look for. (see below) So I took the poor little (ehrm.. not so little, with it's 15" display and 6.39lb weight) bugger to the table, filled with 2 desklamps, an assortment of screwdrivers, paper and pen for notes and screw maps, my camera, and began the work. The Compaq Presario 700 is rather simple to dismantle, once you know where you're going. Most of the screws are of the T8 torque variety; you will find 2 or 3 that use an uber-small philips head.
Getting to the floppy drive requires that you practically dismantle the entire laptop - all under screws, including those under the battery, the display front panel, the keyboard, and underlying metal "plate", then the plastic top housing the touchpad/wrist rests, etc all must be removed. After 1 hour of careful dismantling, picture taking, documenting, screwmapping, I removed the ONE FREAKIN' SCREW holding the floppy drive in place to swap it out with the new one! I would've thought, with all that went in to securing the rest of the laptop together, the manufacturer would've at least secured the floppy drive a little more - but no - one screw. It's not like the drive caddy even snaps into place. It's simply suspended there with one screw.
Afterwards, putting the laptop back together was a breeze with everything properly mapped and such. No orphaned screws! And everything works! doubleplusgood! One always gets a little nervous about doing such things to laptops, especially those that are not your own, but the overall joy of every successful surgery is promptly granted at the first sign of things booting up and even more so when, after testing, every key, every aspect of the device works properly. Gabi seems more than happy to have a fully working laptop again, which is cool. I always like doing this kinda stuff, so for me, it's just more that I can chalk up to experience.
Since this is the first time I've actually had a camera with me, I'll be doing a full write-up with pictures and everything(! ) about dismantling the Presario 700. I'll actually have some real content for the web to read! YAY! :cheer: Now - to find a place to host it.... :waits for someone to offer some space and bandwidth for a little ol' geek with no money: :vbfeg: Above, I mentioned my dislike of Compaq/HP laptops.
So I might as well define now what I like in a laptop. I'm not much into the whole American idea of "bigger is better" (at least for laptops). Honestly, my current 13" display is too much. I've taken a liking to what has been coined as ultra-portable or sub-notebooks. Smaller displays, smaller keyboards, yes. But the benefits are amazing. Some of these notebooks offer a DVD+-RW and are still under 3lbs! Battery lives are a key thing manufacturers look at. A Sony PCG-TR2 with the extended battery has been known to show well over 7 hours of continuous use; closer to 10 hours with every power-saving measure taken!
So I like small-footprint, lightweight laptops. For an example, check out the urlLink review of the Sony PCG-TR1A by gr00vy0ne over at his site, urlLink siliconpopculture.com While my Dell Latitude CPi-A400XT has survived a very abused life, travelingg around the US, to Frankfurt's airport a few times, and now to Hungary 4 times and suffering an accidental 5Ft (1.6m) fall onto a hard tile floor at the airport, it still functions to this day, albeit not as well as when purchased 3+ years ago.
But times they are a changing, and while this thing still runs, it's suffering display issues (no more soft boots :frown: ), has suffered a hard drive failure in the past, and the CPU power just isn't there for me. So, as a replacement, I'm looking into: - urlLink Sony urlLink Vaio urlLink PCG-TR2 - urlLink Panasonic urlLink W-series Toughbook - urlLink Apple urlLink 12" Powerbook In non-geek news, it's still butt cold here - I think last night it hit below -10 C. I know that's not like 0 F, but it just feels DAMNED cold.
I learned a little bit more Hungarian today. Lessons are painfully slow to learn, such as remembering to say vagy instead of vagyok when referring to someone else instead of yourself. Keep an eye out in the next few days for the article on the Compaq to show up (hopefully).
I'll keep everyone posted, and maybe, if I figure out how to do images and such in this blog (I think I need my own host for those too), I'll post some of the more "gruesome" shots :grin: 
