I just finished dismantling, upgrading, and then putting my neighbor's Dell laptop back together. Man, that was an interesting experience. I'm used to working on Toshiba laptops (love them .... just love them), but on those you simply pop open some hatch covers and pop in the new RAM or hard drive. No big deal.
Well, with this Dell, the hard drive was simple to do, but the RAM?? OMG!! You put one stick of RAM in through the bottom, but to put in the other stick, you actually have to remove the keyboard!! Not my idea of great design, but hey.
The thing that took the most time was reinstalling Windows (XP) and the software my neighbor had the disks for. The only problem was that she didn't bother to keep bits of information such as license/registration numbers. That made for an interesting time. I did manage to get it all installed and properly organized, however.
The upside is that she has been having trouble with her laptop keyboard, and now I can install a replacement for her in about 5 minutes flat (and told her that a new keyboard would only cost about $50 at most).
So, that's two upgrades down and four to go!!! Although, I decided against putting Windows 7 on any but one or two of my own machines. I found out yesterday that Canon won't be producing any printer drivers for 7 until well after Windows 7 has gone on the market. Some of the newer printer's Vista drivers work fine with 7, but most of the legacy printers (and by legacy I mean maybe 5 years old at most) do run on Vista, but do not run on Windows 7. And, naturally, all of my neighbors have older printers (and even one of my most used printers is a legacy piece, so I'm going to have to keep at least one laptop in XP to act as a printer server for that machine.
And now that I'm finished with that, I'm going to take a good book and go to bed. Nite all!!
