Found my way to SM South Mall last Sunday, November 12. I was there for kitchen utensils and retro PC purposes but I just couldn't resist passing by the UFO Catchers again after my rounds.
There were two little girls and one little boy there with their yaya and they were trying their hand at the Hello Kitty-filled UFO Catcher which I frequent but with no luck at all. What drew my attention was they were talking to each other in English. Not colegiala English, they spoke in halting (but correct) English. I don't know, but I was so amused that I got these three kitten while they were making the rounds of the other UFO Catchers. They were exclaiming. "Look! He got one!" And then "He got another! And another!"
After I was finished with the machine they were already lined up behind me to try their luck. I just grabbed the three kittens from the top of the machine (that's where I put them when I'm on a roll) and handed it to the three of them saying "Merry Christmas." I think they were too shocked to reply because I just turned around and headed for the car. Sigh. I just felt so good after that, I always do... Putting smiles on other people's faces...
I made the trip to SM because we had this old, heavy, broken-down Compaq Presario 1070 (Series 900D) lying around the house. Its specs: Intel 266Mhz, 16Mb RAM, 1GB HDD, CD-ROM, FDD, 12-inch screen and touchpad. It's obsolete, no more spare parts anywhere except for other broken models which I can't seem to find.
My mother and sister used it for for their school papers when it was working. About two years ago it started to deteriorate. I've opened it up, had to have the floppy disk drive replaced as well as reformat a couple of times. Then the "102 - System Board Failure" error appeared. That meant the main board was dead, no bios tweaks, no Linux and rescue live-cd booting possible, only board replacement could save it.
All the shops I went to exhausted all their contacts (even Compaq and HP calls but no dice). Even asked my brother-in-law George to ask his brother-in-law Erwin who owns a computer business to look at it. No dice. Bye-bye Compaq Presario 1070.
There are some PhP12,000+ replacement boards out there, but I personally think it would be better to just buy a new laptop. So now we're left with a very big "brick" (useless piece of hardware). But it's salvageable for parts. Only thing I knew which could be salvaged was the Toshiba 1Gb hard disk. So after loosening a few screws I was able to open up the wrist rest to expose the hard disk at the lower left side of the bottom portion of the laptop.
A few more loosened screws later and I was able to remove the hard disk. All that was needed was to detach the ribbon connector. Done.
My "brilliant" plan was to encase the hard disk in a cheap 2.5-inch laptop hard disk enclosure, they cost only PhP500+. The HD enclosure connects via USB 2.0 to any computer, which means I could have a 1Gb portable HD (okay, so it's big and clunky and only 1GB, but PhP500 is way cheaper than a PhP1,000+ 1Gb or PhP2,000+ 2Gb USB flash disk).
To my dismay, after making the rounds of all the PC shops, the 2.5-inch Toshiba 1Gb laptop hard disk was so thick and obsolete that it won't fit into the newer 2.5-inch laptop hard disk enclosures. Sigh. I trodded home but not before buying kitchen spoons and forks my mom asked for and doing the UFO Catcher routine.
I think all I could do now is probably buy one of those enclosures and "mod" / modify it to fit (read that as wreck the casing or just use the connector and make a new casing). That would probably be my project for next week.
No comments:
Post a Comment