A productive day

[figmo]

I got a lot done today. In fact, I got more done today than I expected to do.

I had been meaning to upgrade the beige G3 Minitower, aka "Old Faithful," that sits in my computer room. Last night I came home from dinner full of energy, but the laptop unit from the client died and wouldn't come up (power supply problem), so I decided to channel the energy into The Upgrade Project. Suffice it to say this is one of those times where a table shows it best.

	Before	After
CPU	266 Mhz G3	500 Mhz G4
Hard Drive	6 Gigabytes	80 Gigabytes
Memory	192 Megabytes	348 Megabytes
OS	MacOS 8.6	MacOS 9.2.2/MacOS 10.1.4

Is it faster? I'm not sure yet. I am still loading all its old files back onto itself, and that'll take a while.

The installation was screwy. I had to execute undocumented procedures such as "remove the heat sink from the CPU chip." Uh, yeah. Nowhere did it say how you were supposed to remove the heat sink from the CPU chip." When I first got it up I couldn't get it to respond to the keyboard, so I wound up taking it to the shop where I bought the upgrade. After blowing shelling out $75 I learned the instructions they had given me in their printout were incorrect as to which pins required jumpers. The guys at the shop tried giving me MacOS 10.2, but apparently my system wouldn't boot with it.

The problem with the client's laptop turned out to be a loose connector on the power supply itself. The "fix" was a universal power supply from Radio Shack; not cheap, but way less expensive than a new computer. Besides, it's their system, so they'll pay for it anyway. (No, karisu_sama, not your system's problem; this was another client I'm finishing up. Your power supply works just fine, and I'm trying to get your stuff done, too.)

While waiting for the disk to format et al, I went and got lunch, did a little grocery shopping, carefully avoiding temptation in the form of Fry's Electronics and Gryphon Stringed Instruments, got that power supply, and picked up Old Faithful.

I then got home, made dinner, set up the computer while dinner was cooking, then after dinner rushed to Pep Boys to buy a "shop table" that bears a marked resemblance to "laptop tables" except for its price ($29.98 vs. over $100). Even if it's not exactly what I want, for $30 I figure I can cope. :-)

As if all that isn't enough, before I even left to run all those errands I gave Lady a bath and dried her (the latter being far more time-intensive than the former).

I'm now restoring the files onto Old Faithful while I sleep, then I'll copy them over to where they belong as I have time. I have to be at KLIV at 9am tomorrow.

Comments

[hitchhiker.livejournal.com]

I had to execute undocumented procedures such as "remove the heat sink from the CPU chip." Uh, yeah. Nowhere did it say how you were supposed to remove the heat sink from the CPU chip."

The next time you're in a busman's holiday sort of mood, document the lot and toss it google's way. Someone, somewhen will bless you for it (:

[figmo.livejournal.com]

I'd do it were I not so busy cranking out documentation for pay (I'm taking a break right now).