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need a more professional finish
Monday, August 27 2007
My Sony a Vaio PCG-Z505JE has been dead for well over a month now and all attempts to fix it have been thwarted by a combination of its initial problem and my subsequent bumbled attempts at fixes. I'd successfully replace a tiny surface-mount integrated circuit but then accidentally blow out a tiny resistor or diode while checking voltages with a multimeter probe. It's easy on such a finely-detailed circuit board to accidentally bridge adjacent contacts with disastrous (in other words, smoke-producing) results. Another mistake I'd made was one I should have been smart enough to avoid: ordering a replacement motherboard on Ebay in an "as is" condition, believing the seller's story that he'd never tested it. (It was completely dead on arrival.)
Today I took delivery of a replacement, a used Compaq Evo N410c, which has a nearly-identical subnotebook form factor, a CPU running twice as fast, and the ability to hold much more memory. It will allow me to do more effective on-the-road web development, which is why I need a reasonably-capable Windows laptop at my disposal.
As for my iBook, though it worked fine in the Galapagos and Guatemala, it proved fragile while hitchhiking through Scotland. Unlike the solid titanium chassis of the new Compaq, the iBook has a flimsy body of plastic that provides insufficient support for the motherboard, allowing it to flex and the contacts beneath integrated circuits to break. In the case of my iBook, this made the LCD's backlight unreliable, and I'd occasionally have to push on pressure points in order to see the screen. I was able to fix the iBook once I'd returned home (using the heat gun technique), but I don't want to have to go through that headache ever again.
Another problem with using a Macintosh laptop for work it that the operating system doesn't support one of my most fundamental work habits. In Windows there is support for editable addresses in Explorer windows, allowing a user to navigate directly to known parts of the file system just by editing the address in an open folder (this requires you to have selected "Display the full path in the address bar" in Folder Options). It's also possible to copy these addresses into the clipboard and use them in other places. None of this seems to be possible in Macintosh OSX, meaning one has to either search or drill down through hierarchies to find things, and then once they are found one cannot copy the location into the clipboard. (As for Linux, KDE supports this functionality completely, while Gnome does not, at least last time I checked.)
One interesting feature of the Compaq Evo is the presence of a weird nonstandard USB connector beneath a panel behind the screen. This is something Compaq calls the Multiport, and it was designed to allow for the addition of small USB-based WiFi and Bluetooth adapters. Using a Multiport pinout I found online, I was able to adapt the Multiport pads to a conventional USB cable, to which I then successfully attached a 802.11g USB dongle. Unfortunately, the resulting mess of connectors and wires was too fat to fit beneath the Multiport lid. I was forced to use duct tape instead, although I'm going to need a more professional finish before trying to get this laptop onto an airplane.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?070827 feedback
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