I actually meant to but I forgot. I did manage to get a picture of a large stash of 5.25 floppy disks.
Could you grab me an Apple IIe while you're sifting through the ghetto tech? I'd very much like to play Oregon Trail and Carmen San Diego.
I did find 2 486 laptops. I tried to power one up but it was dead. I also found an Ethernet card that was about 14 inches long.
My Superdisk drive burnt out before I could even use it... than I decided to just f* the floppy, I did fine without one.
I just had to resolder a DC jack on a newer laptop, and man was the desoldering a bitch. I guess it's the lead free solder they use now. It has a much higher melting point. Any tips on how to easily desolder this stuff? My soldering iron is a decent quality 60W one, and even it was struggling.
Try some solder wick. Radio Shack will have some for a couple of buck. I've used it and it works really well. You put it on the solder, heat it up, and it sucks the melted solder up. They also sell desoldering tools if you want to spend more money.
Yeah, that was actually exactly what I ended up doing, but it was still very tough to get the stuff off even with the solder wick. I got it all off eventually, but I think I was picking away at it for the better part of an hour. I think the newer lead free solder just has a really high melting point. I was just wondering if there was some better technique I hadn't tried.
That must be some hard core stuff they used. I have a 30W pencil and usually have no problems melting small amounts. Maybe yours had some real silver in it. A 60w iron could actually damage the board components if you aren't careful.
I was careful not to touch the PCB or hold the iron on too long. The laptop powers up fine and charges the battery, so I don't think I broke anything. I actually have two irons, a 30W and a 60W, but the 30W wasn't touching the stuff. I couldn't get it to melt at all. I've fixed busted power jacks before when someone trips over a power cord or something, but I've never had so much trouble. One of the few things I like about Macs is that they use that magnetic power connector so this kind of thing never happens. The motherboard was made by Foxconn. Perhaps the invincible solder was revenge on Americans for having to toil in slavery.
my dogs are the one that always 'trip' over the cords. last time was so funny! it was actually a 'cordless' wii/ nunchuck deal but the little bit of chord wraped around the poor thing's leg as he jumped off the couch (I need to quit laying my toys around) scared him so bad that he bolted to the other end of the room dragging it along with him. That led to a LONG scare cuz he dragged it from room to room lol poor thing. It still works though and the dog is none the worse either (none the wiser obviously too... as this is the second time)
I was just looking at SSDs and holy crap have the prices plummeted. You can now get a 120GB SSD for $100 or a 240GB for $180. Meanwhile, standard HDDs have stayed expensive even now that the flooding in Thailand has resolved. In fact, if you need storage for a notebook, I have no idea why you would even look at standard notebook HDDs at this point.
they're super fast in loading and writing data so yes, you'll see it boot into windows much faster as well as loading games/maps much faster. the other added benefit is that they have no moving parts so they're alot sturdier.
You'll still have a limited number of writes/rewrites compared to disk drives. Apparently something like 5-10 years of average use. I think it's like 100,000 writes or something. However, if you frequently write a lot of data to disk, it will be reduced.
I bought an SSD for my new PC. When I put it together, the first thing I'll do is post here. Then if I stop posting it is because the SSD drive has perished valiantly saving its family from a sinking ship.
Which SSD did you end up getting? I'm not normally a fan of OCZ as a company, but they seem to be some of the most popular. OCZ got on board with SSDs early and in a big way it seems. Those vertex and agility drives seem really popular.
I don't really see how that's any different from a standard HDD in practice. In my experience, most of those crap out right around the 5 year mark, if not sooner. I'm pretty sure that's why they usually have a 3 or 5 year warranty. And at least the failure of an SSD is predictable. A head crash on a standard HDD can happen out of nowhere.
I'm just posting what I know. If you're a casual user then the difference is probably negligible. But if you're doing something like video editing that involves writing a lot of data to disk then it could die very quickly