Back In The Saddle Again.

Greetings,

Been some months since my last post have been to sea for awhile, so would like to update my readers with some of the things I have been doing with  my computers, since I have returned from sea in the last days of December of 2010.

TO START:                                                                                                                                         

My first computer which is an Acer Aspire 5100 notebook, has now been up graded as far as one can go;  what I have done to it.

1. New Memory -original memory 2 each 533 gig, totaling 1 gig; replace with 2 each 2 gig 667 memory.
     (Yes, I know I can only use 3,24 gigs., as the XP Pro Media Center is a 32 bit system; but you can
     really see a big difference in the load time and opening of the programs and files.)

2. Installed a new Hard Drive well actually 2. the 1St. was a 120gig PATA and later on upgraded to160gig
    PATA.

I was able to transfer the entire hard drive from the original using an external enclosure after installing the new drive in the computer. Now when I say the entire hard drive I mean all information on the hard drive including the Recover partition that was provided by Acer. The C-Drive Partition and the D-Data partition as well.

I used a special program on a Boot Disk from Spotmau. A very fine boot disk but can be very dangerous if you use it a little too much. There is a Clone section that allows you to make images of partitions or the whole drive. Which is what I used; draw back is that with USB 2.0 is that the data transfer rate is very slow and took 10 hours to do the job.

Why did I upgrade the hard drive. The original Hard Drive was 80 gigs., and I had so many programs and windows upgrades on the C-Drive that i had less that 7% of free space at one time. This was a 32 gig. partition, you cannot defrag. a partition that has less than 15% free space.

Additionally the drive is 4 years old. and my great (and I urge you to get this) Freeware Acronis Disk Monitor was indicating the life of the hard drive was down to 80%.

The newest hard drive has a C-Drive or operating system partition that is 45gigs. and I have the D-Data partition of the same at 35 gigs and a logical partition of 40 gigs for Misc. Files.

There is an unpartitioned free space block on the 160 gig. hard drive that I am planing to install "Ubuntu"
on so I can learn the Linux operating system.


SECOND PROJECT:                                                                                                                       

If you remember my earlier post about that HP Pavilion DV2500 Notebook that was driving me nuts. The first thing I did when I got off the ship was to finish rebuilding it. As noted in the earlier article the Vista OS died and would not reboot and I was unable to get into the recovery side of the hard drive.

Also my thinking of the time was that the SATA 2.5 Fujitsu  hard drive used a special interface to the motherboard. It was a bit of a struggle but I was able to purchase an exact replacement for a third the cost of getting 1 from HP. I also learned that there was a very cleverly designed adaptor that was removable for the mother board/hard drive interface. Boy do I feel dumb.

End results. New hard drive installed 4 partitions; 160gigs., total. The original hard drive with all the data still intact is now in an external USB enclosure, and I will eventually learn how to extract the data on the Owner's My Documents files, in my spare time on the ships I work on.

Installed Windows-7 Home Prem.;  upgraded the memory from 1to 3gigs. Purchase a USB power Laptop cooler while in China for $10.00 and left instruction not to sit the note book flat on any surface or the hard drive will over heat. It is fast in start up with windows 7 as apposed to Vista with 1 gig. Win-7 uses less memory than Vista and this was my first install of the operating system. (Check out the Windows-7 Installation guide at DIY-Computer-Repair.com)

Had to upgrade several of the Drivers for some of the hardware and software to make them work with Windows -7. Was concerned that 7 would not recognize the wifi drivers and not let me update the Drivers but since I was moving up from Vista most of the Drivers were there and there was no problem.

Window-7 has a very fine recovery system in it that allows you to make an Image of the Operating System and store it on a DVD; Yes it does fit on a single DVD which I did make.

Additionally I made a Recovery Console Boot Disk off the same back up program in Windows-7.

Gave both these disks to my son's mother-in-law with a list of instructions of  how to keep the computer running.

This was a major project that started out being a simple memory upgrade and the installation of the never installed service packs and windows upgrades that somehow went wrong. Many of us hate or have a great dislike for Windows Vista; this is a very costly example of why. These were out of pocket expenses that I was compelled to undertake to get the computer up and running again.

After all it is my counter part in my son's extended family that owns the computer and the repair and upgrades were near the cost of a new computer.

One of life's challenges.

You may ask where did I learn to do these things; from "Monte Russell" webmaster at DIY-Computer- Repair.com For your copy of his book "Self Computer Repair Unleashed" just click on the image of the book to the right and get your copy. Best information source I have found on computers hands down.

Next post will be about my god-daughter's computer 95% rebuild and some of the challenges that; I had in doing the rebuild.