My Place...

I think we are all put here for something. Some people are here to help those who are vulnerable, others are here to teach others. Me? Well I have gotten this distinct feeling over the last couple of days, well weeks really, that my place really is in fixing things. Ever since I was a kid, I always liked taking things apart, finding out how they worked and then putting them back together. I think I got it from my Dad. As a child our house was nearly always littered with car or motorbike parts. I had screwdrivers instead of cups in my room and I was always being told off for taking something or other apart.

These last few days, I have been taking apart, cleaning and repairing Steve's laptop. A Toshiba NB100, it used to be mine until I was going to sell it to a friend. The first thing I had to do was run product recovery and reinstall the Windows XP. Sounds easy enough doesn't it? Now comes the tricky part, the NB100 is a netbook, and as a result it hasn't got an internal CD-ROM drive. You can buy external ones but for some reason, they never seem to work for long, or usually at all, so you end up with a £34.99 paper-weight. We did that once, never again.

So, the logical answer came from experience, last time we ended up doing this, we had to put the hard drive from the netbook in to my old laptop. I did the same in this case, but with a different computer obviously as I no longer have my original laptop. Now it is easy to get the hard drive out of a normal laptop, there is a hatch on the underside, you open that, pop the hard drive out and we're done. Now with a netbook, it is a LOT more complex. I had to take the WHOLE thing apart, unscrew the hard drive from it's mounting, remove the mounting plate and THEN I could put it in my laptop, spin it up and run the product recovery.

After properly fitting everything (and remembering THIS time to screw everything down), running the original set up and cleaning the tea residues with some methylated spirits off the circuit boards (that stuff gets everywhere, and it was no wonder it wasn't running as happy as it could) I was happy. A job well done and Steve now has a good computer that will work for many years to come, of course even better when I have fitted the new keyboard for him obviously.

I also managed to fix my X-Box. I was having some problems with the disc tray. It was sticking and not opening when I pressed the button. So when I finally got inside, I looked to see if the drive had dropped as we thought it may had. It hadn't which is fantastic obviously, but I worked out why it was sticking. Residues of years of dust, grime and general stuff that gathers in these things was jamming it. Also it needs some DW40 to just lubricate it and keep it moving. My X-Box can be running for a few more years!!

Loves
Wendy xx