Vocal Voices

My father has an Acer 5720. I gave him another 2GB of RAM and he replaced the processor (1.4ghz to 2.1). However even with these upgrades it was getting SLOW. Never fast at any time, it was slowness itself. Also it had run out of space (almost) on the drive.

This Christmas I bought my dad a 128GB SSD and a caddy to replace the DVD drive which would fit a hard drive.

Today I cloned the C drive onto the new SSD, cleaned up the old drive and put it in the caddy then fired the machine up.

It's FAST now. 16 seconds to boot to a workable condition. 3 seconds to start word 2010, 2 seconds to start Excel 2010. Space? We moved his "My Music" to the new D drive and he has 55GB free on the C drive and 90GB free on the D.

It'll do him fine for the next 3 years or so, saving a new purchase and giving him a much better experience on the machine. I have said, for a long time, that it is mainly memory and the speed of the Hard Drive which make laptops slow. Today I really proved it.

It's been an interesting day. Trying to fix my broken lock on my car, however, has been an entirely different story.....

Ah, broken locks.

So, you have to get another lock, then take it to bits. Then you have to take the original to bits, stick the key in and reset or swap the tumblers from both so that the key works

Great fun. Not.

Some of us like doing these things, others think that we are odd, or mad.

Same with computers.

Aah well, some boys are like that aren't they?
I used to have a friend who would happily manually rewind 'bits' - tiny thin reels of wire, I'm sure you'll know what I mean - to mend our pinball machines
And stepsister's son, who's now a sought-after sound engineer, was less than two years old when he first started pulling plugs out of sockets and investigating how they worked. He was only about 9 when he rigged up an alarm on his bedroom door that even his electronically-minded father couldn't get past

Boys, eh?