I ordered the wireless card for my laptop from Newegg, and it should be here sometime next Monday. If I am lucky, I’ll get it early: the UPS guy that does the shipping route for my office also does the route for my street. Sometimes when I order stuph, he drops it off at the office. Early play. YAY.
Monthly Archives: January 2008
Z81D: Phase 2
The Z81D is up and running nicely, except for the wireless. I have a plan for that though.
I recently read about this guy who took an Asus Eee PC and handwired in some stuph directly to the USB Bus. I can do that. I will do that!
I think I am going to get a cheapie USB wireless NIC, remove the crappy broken one in the upper right corner of the laptop, and put mine in there, then wire it down into one of the USB ports. It will take up a USB port, but plugging it in normal will anyways. Besides, I dont want some stupid f***ing thing hanging out the side of my machine if I happen to be mobile.
What am I kidding. This thing looks like crap. Case cracked in 4 places. Wireless busted. Non-original . .well… almost everything. Asthetics don’t mean much. Internal is easier to deal with.
This will be fun. Next step: choose a wireless NIC.
I was thinking about this device. Good reviews, relatively inexpensive and it has an external antenna. I can mod the top of the lid, stick the nub out the top and screw on the antenna when I need extra range.
Hmm, much thinking to do.
More laptop stuph
The Armada 7800 project is officially dead. Now, the project is the Asus Z81D.
I have the machine up and running. The original processor was dead and I managed to acquire a replacement. The original was an A64 2800+, and now it’s a Mobile Sempron 3000. No real horsepower there, but when does a laptop ever have real horsepower for this cheap?
Have 512MB RAM, 80GB HDD I scrounged up from the bottom of the parts bin, Windows XP (had an extra copy). Everything works, except the Wireless: it associates but cannot move data or DHCP. Its other specs are okay for its age.
Armada 7800 Project: Phase 2
After running the installation all night, the system is up and running Ubuntu 7.10 desktop. On login it said something about being unable to start the Gnome Settings . .. something. Didn’t write it down. Too lazy. Will fix it later.
It detects the network card, which is good. It doesn’t detect the sound card, which is almost bad. Just more stuph to have fun fixing!
The machine has somewhere around 190MB of RAM. An odd number, to say the least. Top says it’s 190944k, but that doesn’t come out to anything even. (186.46875 MB? Weird shared RAM amount?) It takes about 20 seconds to bring up a terminal. I think the hard drive is failing .. . or just slow as molasses. Could be because the memory load is somewhere around 98%. Maybe I can find some more RAM and a faster Hard Drive for free laying around somewheres.
EDIT: Ripped open the machine: it has 1x 128MB PC100 SODIMM and 1x 32MB PC100 SODIMM. With 32MB onboard we get 192. Close enough for me.
Armada 7800 Project: Phase 1
So, I got this Compaq Armada 7800 as a toy to play with. I figured I would put Ubuntu on it, just to see if I could.
Machine has a Pentium II, some unknown amount of RAM (haven’t been motivated enough to find out yet), a 5GB hard drive and had Windows 2000.
The CD-ROM drive is failing and does not read burned CD’s well. I tried several times with a couple of different discs to get Ubuntu 7.10 desktop installed, but ran into multiple problems, including disk read errors and weird failure at 15% while “detecting file systems”.
I am now trying the ALT CD instead, and it seems to be doing a better job, but because the drive keeps doing the “I am a very stupid CD-ROM and I am going to keep speeding up and slowing down even though I have done so 20 times and I should already know that I can’t read this disk at full speed, but let me just try one more time…” problem, it is being slow about things. Oh, did I mention it’s a Pentium II? *meh*
I don’t really have any use for this machine in a practical sense, but I am curious if I can get it running a “modern” operating system. I like a challenge….