helping you stay protected in the digital age

I apologize for not updating my blog. I’ve been trying to get into the groove of things (IE: school, reading my Bible, work, spending quality [not just time] with my girlfriend, etc…) and haven’t really had time to update. In addition to all of the above, I have been working on some really cool projects lately, which I will describe.

Project #1
The first thing that probably comes to your mind when somebody were to tell you that they are building a laptop is a Dell laptop customization feature. However, what if I were to tell you that I am actually BUILDING a laptop?

Money, money, money! It must cost a thousand something dollars to actually build a laptop! Just the thought of it is crazy! Nevertheless, what if I said it only cost less than one hundred dollars? Insane, you would probably think, and tell me that I need to lay off the caffeine!

Well I’m not insane (although I might give you credit on the stupid idea… my girlfriend would, at least ). Not too long ago I blogged about giving a laptop to a family in Slidell. Well the laptop that they had been given before I gave them a Toshiba was a Dell Latitude CPx. It was really banged up; monitor was barely working, hard drive was locking up, CPU fan had a bad bearing, which made a loud hum, and the temperature sensor had gone out so it ran at 100 percent 100 percent of the time. The DVD-ROM had a flaky laser and the battery didn’t work. Overall, it was shot to pieces.

Then there was Ebay. Thanks to EBay, I was able to purchase new components for this CPx. I guess at the time the CPx model of laptops were popular because one can practically get all sorts of components for very cheap.
So far to date I have replaced the LCD, battery, CPU fan and heat sink, and hard drive as well as the operating system, which is now Windows XP Professional. On the way are two 256mb sticks of RAM, CD-ROM drive, another battery, an 850MHz processor, and new power module for the motherboard.

A “new” laptop for a fraction of what a brand new Dell laptop would cost.

Project #2

I finally finished my Dell Poweredge SC600 Server. Featuring a Pentium 4 1.8 GHz processor, 1GB of RAM, two 120GB Hard drives, and some massive cooling, this server can run beyond what it is actually doing. I am only using it for DHCP, DNS, VPN, and file replication so it really has room to grow. I, like the majority of my computer purchases (except for Broadbandreports.com), acquired this server from EBay a while back. I had worked some overtime at work to get some extra dollars to get this server. Not too bad at all. Now if I could only STOP working on computer stuff and put money into my education! (Its ok mum and dad, I have put some money into my school and next paycheck I promise to put in more because I KNOW you read my blog).

Valentines day is coming up quickly fellas so make sure you get your sweetheart something nice! This year, Lauren and I decided to not get each other gifts but to use the money we would spend on each other and give it to our compassion children, Amelia and Brian. Lauren will have to tell you about Amelia but Brian really means a lot to me; he is only 6 years old (will be 7 this year) but what is unique is that he and I share the same birthdate. I didn’t know this until after I started sponsoring him.

~ by johndball on February 11, 2007.