. Spinning .

Unreal.  In the technology field, no less.  To get the old fashioned service and caring on one of the newest inventions such as this DELL Laptop.

Brad, a Dell rep for the Dell Online Community Outreach program wandered onto this site as I was going through my Laptop LCD replacement.  He kindly left a comment about my keyboard and suggested I contact him via e-mail to arrange for a new one (I now do have the rather pricey warranty but well-worth-it once the laptop reached three years of daily use) and I did.  This morning’s e-mail said he’d arranged to have it shipped yesterday from Texas.  I got it about an hour ago and it’s already in and obviously working.

It took only about five minutes and the extra time was just to take the photos below.  The last image is of my old keyboard with some missing vowels and consonants.  Brad, and DELL, thank you!

Rather a nice surprise to see how Dell reps go above and beyond to keep customers happy.  Brad works at Dell and evidently wandered onto Spinning and left a comment after reading my posts on the replacement of the LCD on my beloved laptop.  He’s going to have me replacing the keyboard as well, since it would help if I had my e,i, l, o, d and n to work with.  I’ll be posting on my progress with that when I get it.

Well I did it.  I replaced the laptop LCD and it’s working just fine.  The only problem I had was with those damn screws and I finally was able to loosen and get them out with plenty of patience and time-outs.

I’m just so happy to have use of the laptop again.    I should’ve asked Miguel at Dell for some keys as well:  The i, o, e, l, s and n are worn away after three years, though I’ve tried repainting them in white it hasn’t worked.   Odd though that the main computer in the house has gone through about a half-dozen mice, four cases, three monitors, four or five motherboards, at least seven hard drives, three power supplies, and four operating systems and yet…I still am using the original Logitech keyboard.

Should’ve taken less than an hour to replace the lcd in the laptop monitor.  I think it could’ve.  The connections are easy enough.

Except that some effing animal put this one together and glued the bezel on and tightened the teeny-weeny screws (soft-headed btw) with the might of Superman.

This is why you have a tech do it.  When he throws the damn thing across the room in frustration, it’s his problem to pay for it.

Just got the replacement parts for the laptop screen—faster than lightning, yes but uh…I didn’t realize that it was really just the LCD screen and cables and stuff so that the whole cover has to be taken apart and put back together.  I did see a site somewhere where they had good visuals of the laptop parts and how to put it together.  Just have to find it.

Then work up the courage to take things apart.  Then gingerly put it all together again.  Maybe a tech would have been faster seeings that it may take me days to get up the nerve to do this.

Well, it’s as I thought.  I hooked the laptop up to the new pc monitor and it worked so I was able to contact Dell and had a lovely online support chat:

8:56:31 AM		SMB_Miguel_167710	I am sending a replacement
8:56:47 AM		Susan Gibb	Oh my. Is he really that sick?
8:57:06 AM		SMB_Miguel_167710	would you like to receive the part and replace it yourself or a tech?
8:57:23 AM		Susan Gibb	What part are we talking about?
8:57:46 AM		SMB_Miguel_167710	the whole LCD with cables
8:58:24 AM		Susan Gibb	I’ve built pc’s, so I might be able to do it. Is it difficult? Am I covered for a tech?
8:59:06 AM		SMB_Miguel_167710	is not difficult
8:59:21 AM		SMB_Miguel_167710	sending the parts take less time
8:59:53 AM		Susan Gibb	Okay. Let’s do it that way then. I love the little guy and the faster he’s up and well, the better.

Actually, it’s been hinting for a while that it wasn’t feeling well.  Now the screen goes black and I can’t get it to stay on long enough to reach any program.  I’ve been putting off calling Dell because I can’t live without Latitude in my life, even though luckily I have the new main PC up and running. 

Even now, I hate to make that phone call, knowing they’ll take Latty away for a while.  I keep hoping he’ll wake up and shine bright eyes at me in the morning, feeling chipper and completely over whatever bad bit of spam or whatever he ate that caused it.

Have almost all the software in and working properly on the new pc, even installing new drivers for the monitor, upgrading to the latest Quicken program, getting Media Player back up to version 11 and installing the Nvidia encoder so that it works properly.  One last program to put in and I should have a super machine working here.  Even have the network set up and running and all four computers have met and are comfy with each other. 

Aside from the hard drive connectors and the resulting cramming in of the drives, this has been the smoothest build ever.  So now I have 200 gigs to play on with 2 gigs of memory for speed and a wide flat panel to watch it all happen.

One of the primary uses of Microsoft’s Solitaire is to visually note any increase in computer speed after the addition of any RAM modules in an upgrade.

I have  2 Gig of memory in this new machine, but according to Solitaire, this sucker’s not as fast as Jim’s 600 Mb AMD cpu with 512 RAM.

Watch the ending of the card animation when you win a game.  If they zip so fast you can’t see it, you’ve got a fast machine.  When you can watch them roll and bounce, you’ve got a dog.  (This is the only reason, BTW, that you need to move the cards all the way through to the end; if you stop at the 8′s and add 200 you’ve got your score, at two 6′s and add 300, or at the 4′s and add 400, you save lotsa time.)

So why is this so slow?

Aside from the fun in problem-solving and learning new things, there is great satisfaction in building something that works.  Sometimes it’s a computer.  Sometimes it’s a pie, or squeezing grapes or peaches into wine.

As you can see from the photo, I try to remember to make notes as I’m going.  This particular copybook has information from the first computer I built in January of ’97, all the way through this go-round.  The same thing with the wine; I wouldn’t have remembered that back in ’98 I added sugar and ascorbic acid (to prevent re-fermentation) to the peach and raspberry wine just before bottling.  Notes are important that way.

I’ve been thinking about how and why the software installations have gone through basically with few hitches and none that I couldn’t work around and I suspect that part of the reason is that the computers are networked.  I held off on the rebuilding until a particular  time when loss of internet connection wouldn’t be a major problem.  Even as I had the new pc up and running, the internet cable was still hooked up to the hollow shell of the old pc because regardless of all the missing parts, it still worked (though I realize it was just a junction point at that state).  As soon as I plugged the cable into the new pc, it knew exactly who and where it was and internet connection was immediately established.

I love it.

Had I known that the software side of the new pc was going to go so well, I would not have put off this building of the main pc for so long.  I’ve never had a problem with the hardware end before, and this time I did.  What I’ve learned from that is that even in two years things change mightily and it was my own fault for not realizing that the SATA drives are the new hot setup and I would have ordered accordingly. However, I must say that I was a bit disappointed in Tiger Direct’s failure to include at least one SATA drive–the h/d or the CD/DVD player–in the barebones system as offered.  That one glitch caused many problems in the maneuvering of hardware as well as software in the building of the system.

But what fun to work these problems out!  I held my breath as I put the Win XP back in–knowing that it wouldn’t recognize the hardware and then balk at activation (since the old hard drive with all the data already on it would do the same thing, plus the fact that I couldn’t connect it because of the single EIDE cable that the new drive and the CD were already on and needed to be on).  Everything went smooth as silk.  I waited a day to activate the program, armed again with the phone number of Microsoft support, but it accepted activation and registration online with no problems.  Odd, but a tremendous help not to hit a snag in the system.

Little by little I’m installing the other programs. Office was a problem to reckon with–having upgrades and having long ago formatted the 28-disk Win 3.1 version.  Last time all I had to do was insert disk #1 in the floppy and point the installation to that and it went through nicely.  Wish I’d have remembered this when I finally decided they were useless except as blank disks.  But I managed to fiddle with things and now have all the Office programs cleanly on there.  I’ve already copied and pasted most of my Word documents from the laptop files via a flash drive into the main pc.  Network’s great, but a duplicate system is much better as it serves as a backup and I do have an external drive that’s big enough to handle larger transfers.

Next comes the Adobe Suite, Quicken, and Flash.  Then I’ll feel secure enough to wipe the old 60-gig hard drive clean and stick it in either the shop pc or in Jim’s pc. 

I’m really enjoying this and always did–should’ve majored in computer science rather than English perhaps, but if nothing else, I’m making sense of the poorly translated installation manuals (hey, there’s a job for me!). Life is good.

The Dell monitor–not too thrilled with the clarity unless I can adjust something or put in the video card as added help to the integrated graphics, but it only weighs 12 pounds…

And this is neat, a glow-in-the-dark PC:

Not quite as romantic in daylight:

For the first time in all the years I’ve been building computers the hardware gave me grief and the software didn’t.  Of course, I’ve still got to activate Win XP and that’ll take another phone call to Microsoft to explain that the system was rebuilt and I’ll be using this o/s only on the one pc.  I did call and talk to somebody before I actually got the pc finished and I think she told me to try putting it in by putting in the old hard drive and I tried to tell her that no, it wouldn’t work because the hard drive would notice that the processor, motherboard, CD, and the very home they live in was not where it was supposed to be.  Maybe she didn’t understand me, but then I had a hard time understanding her too.  I wish they would put people in the technical support area who can speak clearly and distinctly. I’ve only gotten one out of all the phone calls to support I’ve made.

I have never had the trouble with the hardware that I’m having with this system.  The case has four bays for CD units or the like, and six bays for the hard drives and floppy, but where do you have to put them to get them connected?  Since there is only one EIDE connection, the CD and the hard drive have to be within 3" of each other, since there’s only 6" between the connectors and there has to be a twist in it.  In between that 3" is the bay where a floppy has to go.  And, the memory has to be removed so that any of these can be put in place.

Is that a brilliant feat of engineering or what?  This case, of course, was made overseas.

Finally got back into the rebuilding of the main PC and was a bit upset to realize that the motherboard has only one plugin for an EIDE hard drive while it has two for the SATA.  I hadn’t even thought about it but what gets me is that in this barebones system that included a CD/DVD unit and a hard drive, neither one is set up for SATA.  I usually have TWO hard drives and a CD/DVD player which would require at least two ribbon cables, and now it looks like I’ll have to forego the second hard drive and eventually buy a new one with SATA connection.  It is also going to make it difficult for me to as easily and safely transfer the hard drive data onto the new drive; maybe impossible for the O/S because it will need the CD to confirm it. Yet the M/B does include a plug-in for the floppy drive!  I guess this is why there’s such a huge range of pricing in parts and why you really need to look at things closely and read all the specs, especially if you haven’t been current in building in the past couple of years.

But ohboyohboyohboy–I should be getting the new monitor today. 

And even more ohboy:  I should be getting a new propane stove delivered for the shop this week.