Pilot's Log

My optical mouse was beginning to get balky...the left button was only working intermittantly. So I shut down, unplugged it, took it apart, and the lever for the button was getting worn down, as was the corresponding part of the button circuit assembly. Time for a kludge. Got a thin scrap of plastic from a vacuformed model kit, glued it on the pad of the lever, and sanded it down to paper-thin. Just enough to engage the switch again. I think I bought six more months on this mouse...but I believe I'll have to replace it when I upgrade my systems.

A couple years ago, we inherited a piece of nondescript hardware from the estate of our departed neighbor Otis. Dad had no idea what the black box was, so he had me go through the paces of finding out. It was a satellite receiver box from DirecTV. Since we neither had cable nor a satellite dish it was pretty much useless to us, although it was in working order and would have been completely functional if we also possessed the remote control.

During the months leading to the national digital TV switchover, we attempted to use the receiver box as a pass-through (because we had television sets that lacked the proper connecting hardware) but this wasn't a good solution and we soon got newer TV sets.

So this fall I thought about just returning the thing to DirecTV. Took it to the local franchise office, and the clerk told me..."we don't use those anymore. We switched our systems a couple years ago..." and she instructed me to contact DirecTV corporate's website.

And I did and they replied, "It's completely obsolete. It's your property now and your responsibility."

Showed it to my brother-in-law the more-geek-than-me when it comes to electronics hardware and he said, "Don't want it in my shop! Can't use it for anything!"

So tonight it had an appointment with my monkey-wrench and screwdriver and wire cutters. An hour later it was rendered into half a dozen circuit boards, an empty metal housing, a plastic facia, a grounded power cord (that I suppose I could reuse or convert into an extension cord), a plastic circuit board mount, and an assortment of fasteners, brackets and greeblies. The circuit boards await the next scheduled e-waste drive. Dunno if I have any future use for the metal housing, tho' I'm sure I can just donate it to the Tech Center boys...I know they could likely use it as a "breadboard" case.

It's better to take something like this apart and deal with the components separately than to chuck the whole schmeer in a landfill. And it's somewhat theraputic.

After suffering yet more Stop Errors with my compy today, I decided to take the original motherboard fan and heat sink off and get them replaced.

Went to the Sevierville Staples. They didn't have any motherboard fans. They stopped carrying motherboard fans in the time since I bought my current CPU fan from them.

So on the morrow (or a few hours thereafter), I will take compy to Knoxdad and have the guys who put it together put a new fan in it, and perhaps make elsejustments.

I'm posting this message from my mother's compy, by the way, if you hadn't already surmised the fact.

FP

Hey.

I just spent about half of this evening disassembling/salvaging the hardware of the moribund NoName PC. (In hindsight, I could have named it "Celery Green", because of the green trim on its case and the Celeron processor inside it...but I don't care for veggies much.) And so, I have a stripped-out frame, and all its components removed. This is the second time I've done this sort of thing, so I have a bunch of still somewhat viable computer hardware, including:

* two power supply units
* three CD-ROM drives, one of which is a Hewlett-Packard RW unit
* four floppy drives, 2 X 3.5 inch and 2 X 5.25 inch
* at least one modem
* a USB outlet that was hardly ever used
* at least one keyboard
* a brand-new mouse (see previous blog)
* a perfectly good monitor
* a perfectly good H-P Deskjet 695 printer
* two sets of external speakers (as well as a couple "internal" ones
* memory chips (well, these may not be good)
* motherboard-to-drive ribbon cable
* screws, fasteners, jumpers, cables, cooling fans, and a pair of clock batteries

And so, the thrifty and frugal guy I am will probably ask the salesman at the store with which I shall do business tomorrow whether the upcoming computer could use any of these things...or if trading-in will get me a discount from the bottom line. At the very least, I need BOTH types of floppy drives (NoName didn't have a 5.25 in., one was from FrankIntel's Monster--the computer NoName replaced) as my mother and I have a bunch of "legacy" content still on 5.25 format.

And if I don't get to use everything, I know an outfit that will want it for recycling.

Some good will come of this, I swear.

FP