Posts Tagged ‘computers’

Holy shit, folks… this thing is seriously that fast.

You know that laptop that I mentioned? The one whose letter i I would have to replace?

I’m pretty sure that I mentioned it here, because (your) god only knows how many struggles I had with it.

Well, as it turned out, the entire keyboard was going out… and it was soldered on the bottom of the computer, beneath everything important, which meant that opening it up to replace the keyboard would have been dicey, and then you would have had to put everything back together on top of the keyboard and hope that you did everything right. When taking into consideration the fact that this one make and model of computer had like… between three and six different keyboards, and no one knew if they were cross-compatible with each other, I decided that the best thing to do would be to get a refund on the laptop since I would have kept it if the keyboard had worked. It was a bit of a shame because of the hard drive size and the price that I paid for it, but by paying a little extra on top of the refund that I got from that computer, I was able to get what some people like to call “a gaming rig”. The hard drive size was smaller, but the processor is extremely fast, and it can take up to a whopping 64GB of DDR4 RAM. I’m not actually sure whether I will max it out in the coming months or years because it already runs fast, but I do have one 16GB stick of DDR4 RAM that was taken out of one of the computers over the years that I might put in the empty bay in this…

I’ve also decided that I’m not going to watch the formal series finale of Supernatural at all. I tried to fast-forward to the end of the episode where Dean and Sam are reunited with each other in Heaven, but for some reason Netflix would not let me do that, so it is what it is. That episode is trash though and I’m not going to bother with it. Dean still deserved so much better than what the producers and writers gave him.

If it’s not one thing, it’s… well, another. Thing.

I am now in possession of a laptop with a better processor and better graphics than my old one, even though this one can only take 12GB of RAM (and it’s already maxed out, it was that way after I purchased it) and my former laptop could take up to 16GB of RAM. However, the i key has been giving me trouble for almost as long as I’ve had it in my possession, although I hope to ameliorate that problem with a replacement key from… wherever I can find one for an Acer Aspire 315-21. Worst case, I’ll just buy a replacement keyboard for this and take the necessary key(s) off of that. After all, they seem to be sold on eBay. And absolute worst case, I can gently glue this key to the little stopper and have it work that way.

Sorting this out and getting the i key back up and runnning are seriously all I have to do here.

The curious case of my… failing laptop.

Based on a thorough cleaning of the device, my laptop’s fan motor seems to be going out. There’s not much that can be done for that aside from replacing the entire fan, and it then becomes a question of whether or not that is truly cost-effective given the age of the laptop. I’ve begun to look at local pawn shops to see what laptops they have available that would take the RAM that this one has, that way that RAM wouldn’t have been a waste of time to procure (DDR4, 16GB). I would also like to get a computer with a large HDD rather than one with a small SSD, simply because I like having a lot of room on my computer and SSD computers are a lot more expensive than their HDD counterparts for the same amount of space. If the variation in price weren’t as prolific as it was I might (and, trust me, it is), consider being willing to accept a SSD hard drive.

If I can’t find an acceptable, suitable laptop at any of the local pawn shops, I will start looking online.

At least this laptop lasted awhile, even though I had to get it too from a local pawn shop of all places. Heh…

Another one bites the dust, round… what?

The fan in this computer has resumed being… louder than it should be, even though I’ve made sure that the computer is clean (at least on the outside where I can see it), used compressed air on the side of the can near where the fan would be and at the bottom of the computer where I know the compressed air can reach it to some extent. Although I thought that the compressed air helped it out for awhile, it didn’t help it out as much as it should have, so I’m back to square one with this. At some point I’d like to have the laptop looked into and see if the fan being cleaned with the bottom of the computer… temporarily not on the bottom of the computer can help things, and if that doesn’t significantly help matters out, begin looking into a replacement PC laptop. It sure would help things out a lot if we had already been given the second stimulus check that lawmakers and politicians had been promising that they “would find compromise on”, but that hasn’t happened, and I honestly don’t think that there is even going to be a second stimulus check at this point.

Prove me wrong.

Just like I was pleasantly proven wrong with the results of the Presidential election.

Meanwhile, I need to add things to our Amazon wish list for Monster’s fourteenth (!!) birthday and Christmas. I had added some things to them in the past, but I have a very bad habit of buying those things that I put on our wish list, so… there you have it. Right now, I think there are only a few things left on the whole entire list…

This has saved me both time and trouble.

One of the things that I’ve resumed doing is queuing posts, especially when I’m not having migraine activity.

Meanwhile, for some strange reason our laptop’s fan has been a bit louder than it should be. I’ve cleaned the bottom the computer as well as I’m able to, but I think that replacing a fan when it’s soldered to the motherboard is beyond even my expertise with a computer. When that time comes, I think my best bet is going to be getting as affordable of a laptop as I can find to replace this one. This computer isn’t that old, and it’s been taken care of as well as you can possibly take care of a computer, so I’m chalking this up to “bad things randomly happen some of the time”. And based on the location, not to mention my knowledge of computers, I know that it’s the fan. I’ve been price-checking comparable computers in the interim, because we don’t need anything outrageously powerful… just something with the same specifications that this has.

Someone who’s become like a maternal figure to me did walk me through everything that I need to do to clean the fan if I do decide to “take it apart”, and I am thankful! I do software more than I do hardware…

Anyway, requirements for a good computer, at least in this household:
· can get online
· allows the kids to do educational things
· plays the kids’ games

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