New Computer

[kevin_standlee]

New for me, anyhow. The Latitude D600 I bought on eBay arrived a few days ago, and I have been configuring it as time permits. I bought this because it's the same model as my work PC, and because Latitudes are more reliable than the wonky Inspirons like the one that seems to enjoy eating hard drives. Since the Latitude D600 and the Inspiron 600m are parallel models, many of their parts are interchangeable, although not the hard drive caddy, because the Latitude is thinner (and half a pound lighter) than the Inspiron. After listening to me complain about the troubles with the Inspirons, Lisa told me to go out and buy a used Latitude. (She paid for it out of her account.)

After confirming that the machine would boot on the as-shipped 40GB hard drive, I took the drive out and cloned it into one of the 250GB hard drives I have here. I then put the 40GB drive in the fire safe, to use as an "if all else fails, start over" backup, and did all of my system configuration on the 250GB drive. I swapped around memory chips between the various computers so that the Latitude -- which will become my new "flagship" machine -- has 2GB memory, while the other machines get 1 GB and 0.75 GB each, which should be okay as I don't expect to use them very often.

Getting all of my software reinstalled is tiresome, but the need to get it running isn't urgent since I can still get work done on other machines, so I'm installing stuff as I find time and can leave the machine to think about it, such as when I set it to copying many GB of documents from backup drives last night when I went to bed.

This new machine is by no means a top-of-the-line machine, but it cost less than $200 and will do everything I need to do, so I'm feeling pretty good about it.

Comments

[paradoox.livejournal.com]

Cool. Did you actually swap both memory chips including the one under the keyboard yourself? I'm impressed. I recently picked up a D630 from the Dell Outlet shop because I wanted a Windows XP machine and having the same docking station and extra battery and DVD drives as my old D610 and Precision M20 was a plus. I haven't fully configured it yet though. My M20 is 4.5 years old and getting very long in the tooth. (Hopefully it won't read that and got offended as I'm typing on it.)

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

On the D600 (and the 600m), the two memory slots are on the underside of the computer, behind a little door held in place by a captive screw. There are not (to my knowledge) any memory chips under the keyboard. (I'd be leery of removing the keyboard!) It's fairly simply to swap the memory chips in and out, although you need to be careful and make sure they're properly seated, and it's a little odd that because of the mirror symmetry of the slots, you have to install one chip upside down relative to the other. I didn't push one of the chips in all the way the first time, so when I tried to start it, instead of a POST, I got nothing but flashing lights on the keyboard. That gave me a fright until I remembered that flashing lights can mean a memory chip out of place. I turned it back off, opened the door, and saw that indeed one chip wasn't seated properly.

The part that makes me nervous about doing this is that you have to push hard until the chip goes chunk into the slot and there's a lot of little plastic bits, so if you do it too hard, you can break something.

[paradoox.livejournal.com]

Ah on the D610 / M20 there is one chip on the bottom and one under the keyboard. I got the helpdesk people to do it at work to do it for me.