Battery dilemmas

Personal,

Since the last post about the V2000 coming back to life, but only to frustrate me even move, it would seem the common denominator is the battery. First of all their is no problem running on A/C power regarless which drive is in. The caviot here is the battery cannot be in the laptop. With the battery in funky things happen, as mentioned earlier. So what remains to be seen is it the physical battery or some part of the motherboard which is used for charging/discharging.

A test with another machine which takes the same battery will answer the question. As for someone local not that I’m aware of but my mom has a Compaq that would take my 12 cell. May just need to wait till we see them again. If I need to roam the i200 is running well on Debian, even at six plus years old.

More laptop confusion

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With the old IBM i200 now running Debian and a backup copy of my /home I’ve gone back to trying to figure out what the heck is going on with the V2000. I did some testing all day yesterday, bascially just to see if it would run without any load. I let it sit plugged in, no screen saver no sleep, and did the same thing with battery power. Amazingly it ran without a problem both ways. I’m even typing this entry on it, been running all day no hiccups.

The one caviot was when trying to boot the Windows drive, nothing. I guess I could say switching drives in and out between the two OS’s freeked the BIOS out, but I don’t see how that’s possible. If I lived in the hardware world maybe I could come up with something that made more sense. So between the two I should be able to get a few more years of use, or at least I hope so. If the V2000 fails me I’ve got a backup with a keyboard that rocks. And to think I was checking out a Lenovo T60, at todays rate it’s about $1,600.00 ouch!!!

The V2000 has died (updated)

Personal, ,

Yesterday as I typed at the start of the day the laptop went dark. That was rather unusual as I didn’t notice the battery running low and I was on AC. I switched outlets, nothing. Flipped it over to take out the bottom and nothing obvious as to a problem. So at this point I’m thinking power supply or mother board. No lights when I plug it in, no ticks or sound period. After a buddy came by with a volt meter the cord is good but nothing coming from the A/C outlet on the mother board. That sucks.

A new board is $460 and I’ve only had it since Jan. of 05. I was hoping it would last me five years… barley made it two. So now the decision spend 60 to 80 percent of what it would cost for a new toy to get me back to 05 technology or get another one. That just burns me I paid extra for a gig of memory and a 12 cell battery just so I wouldn’t have to do this in a few years. I even busted out the old i200 to see if I can get Xubuntu running on it. Given enough hammering I think I could but man is it slow. I guess it could be worse, could have been the tower that I use for work and what Kay uses. Maybe I should be thankful that one didn’t bite the dust. I’d hate to think what hoops I’d have to jump through to get the drive to boot with a new motherboard.

Update 3/15/2007: I must be a complete idiot. After much googling and almost deciding on getting an external battery charger, 70 dollars vs the price of a new mother board, I put everything back together and turned it on. Booted with no problems and battery is at full charge. Disconnect the power for a while and plug it back in, battery is charging. If I was smarter I would have thought maybe the drive went bad or faulted which caused the problem in the first place. I never swapped out the drives. This is great cause I didn’t want to replace it… but call me stupid cause I didn’t figure it out sooner.

Update 3/17/2007: Maybe I wasn’t as dumb as I thought. The system has not run for more than 4 hours at a time now. In the last 12 hours won’t stay up more than 5 minutes regardless which drive I put in. Very disappointed at the moment. So I’m working on the old i200 loading Debian.

Roscoe under the knife

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Sleeping with a cone

Last week I took Roscoe to have some “things that shouldn’t be there” looked at. A lump on his chest and an extra nipple, that wasn’t a nipple, were of concern. Lately the lump seemed to get bigger and the nipple was filling with blood. So after a trip to the vet and scheduled surgery they both came out. The lump they’ll send off for analysis and we’ll get the results when the stitches come out. Until then he’s stuck wearing a cone which is hilarious.

Both were on the right side so you can’t see them in the pic, but he could still get to them without the cone. So for another week he’ll have to wear it until the stiches come out, unitl then he’s a barrel of laughs… more than normal. Can’t stop running into stuff, closes the deck gate when he wants to come in, and ironically is a little more relaxed than normal. I think at times he feels like he’s being punished for something, but doesn’t fight it when it’s time to put in on. He’s a nut !!!!

Huccups

Personal

It’s been at least ten years since I had hiccups until last night. Crazy, not sure if it was shock of cold air and me being worn out from hockey or what. I’ll chaulk it up to the wrong combo of exercise, beer, and pizza … I’ll have to remember that.