Stan Olson’s Blog

A friend of mine recently brought me their laptop to revive from the dead. It needed a new hard drive, more memory, Windows XP reinstall, and a new CPU fan. The first 3 items I took care of as soon as the parts arrived and had everything running great. I ordered the CPU fan off eBay which took quite some time to receive. (thanks USPS!) I had never replaced a CPU fan on a laptop before, so I consulted Dell’s service manual for further instructions. The removal of the CPU fan was pretty simple as it required just removing 2 screws and unplugging the power connector. However, to get to it you pretty much had to remove everything else in the laptop:

-Remove Battery
-Remove Memory
-Remove Hard Drive
-Remove Wireless card
-Remove Keyboard
-Remove Display
-Remove Palm Rest
-Remove Microprocessor Thermal-Cooling assembly

The first 4 items were simple to remove as all were located on the bottom of the system. I won’t go into great length on each step of the process, but it was very time consuming as I didn’t want to break anything. Once I got everything removed, I installed the new fan and carefully reassembled the laptop. I booted it up into Windows and ran my system fan utility which lets me control the speed of the fan. When I cranked it up to max speed, it made a horrendous noise. This wasn’t good as now I’d have to repeat the process and remove everything again. (doh!) Once I got to the fan, I removed it and compared it with the old fan. Everything looked the same except the new fan had a slightly higher top that the other. I’m guessing this was making contact with the bottom side of the keyboard or side of the case to make the horrendous noise. I decided to clean and oil the old fan to see if it would work again. I got a little lazy which almost ended up screwing up the whole system. I plugged the old fan back in and powered the system on without putting everything back together first. I wanted to see if the thing would spin up at all. It seemed to work fine, but the system decided to lock up on me while booting up. I figured at this point I’d go ahead and put everything back together and see if that fixed the problem.

I booted it up and got a bunch of errors on the screen. (good job Stan, good job…) It was spewing out numerous memory errors which lead me to believe I’d zapped one or both of my memory chips. To make matters worse, the screen was flickering and had static all over it. (oh holy crap!) Seeing this made me think I’d tightened a screw too tight and nicked the cable going to the display. I thought for sure I’d fried the system, but I didn’t panic and started troubleshooting. I took the system apart yet again and reseated the display connector and made sure I wasn’t squashing the cable. I also reseated both memory cards to see if that was the problem.

The moment of truth was now here as I powered up the system. The BIOS beeped at me telling me that the memory size had changed. (oh no) Luckily, it was a good thing as it was seeing both memory sticks this time. (whew!) I booted up into Windows and the display was normal again. (double whew!)  I tested the fan with my program and it powered up to full speed with no problem and no loud noise. Not wanting to push my luck anymore, I called it a success and packed it away in the case.

It was a good learning experience for me as I’d never gone that deep into a laptop before. Thanks to Dell for providing a service manual on their website, I couldn’t have done it without them. (well I probably could have but would have broken something for sure) :-) I took a few pictures during the disassembly and have posted them here.

I bit the bullet and decided I wanted an iPod shuffle last night. Why? Well at first I stumbled across a great deal on a refurbished 1st gen 512mb shuffle for $19 + s/h from Outpost.com. Things were going well, order was confirmed, credit card was charged, and I got the confirmation email. About 20 minutes after I placed the order, I received a 2nd email stating the order had been canceled. (apparently they haven’t figured out real time inventory yet) This bummed me out as I was wanting to get this as an early birthday present for myself. I’ve been wanting some form of iPod that I could sync up with iTunes and put podcasts on. I didn’t want to spend hundreds on a Nano or Video iPod.

So this morning I get up early and head out the door about 30 minutes before my normal departure time. I figured I’d head to Wal-Mart and pick one up there since they’re $1 cheaper than everyone else. Well I got there and they were out of stock, at least on the floor. There were no employees around to look in the back, so I gave up and went to work. I should have expected this from Wal-Mart since there was no help to be found last year when my parents were shopping for an HDTV. Anywho…

I went to work and got online to see who else in town sold iPod’s. Good ol’ Circuit City had them and luckily my store was the only one in a 50 mile radius that had them in stock. So I ordered one online and scheduled an in-store pickup. During my lunch hour, I went and picked it up. Quick and easy, $79.99 plus tax and I was on my way.

The first thing I noticed is just how small it is. It measures about an inch high and just over 1.5 inches wide. The clip is pretty nifty, it will fit on just about anything. The dock hooks up to the USB port on your computer and has a headphone jack for the connector on the iPod. (I’m guessing there wasn’t room for a mini-USB port) Installation was automatic, Windows XP figured out that it was an iPod Shuffle and iTunes found it as well. I copied my podcasts over to it and it seems to do the job just fine. Who needs a display? Maybe for music it’d be nice, but for me I’m good without one. I’ve got my MyFi that plays my music and it has a nice display on it, so I don’t need one for my ‘podcast’ player. I’ve included a few pics I took on my horrible camera phone but I think you’ll get the idea. I’ll take some better ones later on.

So it took me until 2006, but I’m finally an iPod owner. Never thought that would happen, but it did. I can see this being a big Christmas hit and folks who are into the jogging/walking thing would enjoy this too. Now I just need more podcasts to listen to.