Okay, so a few months back I purchased one of these USB GPS to use with my laptop for road trips and wardriving. It seemed to simple enough, it’s a Prolific 2303 USB to serial adapter chip coupled to a NMEA GPS receiver, but I was having some weird issues where it would sporadically stop working when being used in my car. After doing some testing, I determined that it ran fine off the laptop’s battery, but cut out immediately if I plugged my laptop into my AC inverter. My guess is that the AC inverter wasn’t spitting out a very clean sine wave, and that the power fluctuation was being carried through my laptop’s AC adapter and through the USB port to mess up the GPS.
So, three possible solutions came to mind immediately. 1) Get a better AC inverter that spits out a cleaner AC sine. This would probably be expensive, and there’s only so much you can do with a car’s DC power supply anyway. 2) Get a better AC/DC adapter for my laptops. My thinking here was that something other than my laptops-for-less adapter might do a better job of scrubbing it’s DC output. 3) Some sort of USB power regulator (no idea if such a thing exists, or really how to build one.)
After doing some digging online, I found a couple boards talking about audio humming from PCs plugged into AC inverters, which presented a forth option: a DC-DC power adapter for my laptop. I did a little more digging and discovered that Targus makes such a device that works with my laptop, and it’s even sold at CompUSA.
So, before my Sunday D&D game, I stopped by CompUSA in Nashua and picked one up. Tried it out a little before game, and again on the way home from Denny’s. GPS worked the entire time, so I’d say this fixed it up nicely. Overall I’m rather happy with it, though the $80 price tag was a little much. I guess that’s what I get for buying a cheapy GPS in the first place. The Targus device is pretty cool though, and the DC-DC thing should be more efficient than the DC-AC-DC rig I had running before (and I don’t get interference on my FM radio anymore!) There’s some accessories you can get for it to charge all sorts of things, like my Clie or my cell phone, which I might consider down the road.
Okay, so it’s got 1GB of RAM, a Turion 64, a 1400×1050 15″ screen, it looks like Linux will run on it, and it’s within my price range. Can someone please point out the glaringly obvious reason I don’t want one of these?
With the help of Mark at work, my laptop is now fixed again! We took apart the screen to find that Sony made the panel in such a way that all the screws for the hinge went through the hinge and LCD assembly, and into the plastic backing. With the plastic broken, there was nothing holding the LCD to the hinge. We put in a little screw and nut just holding the LCD assembly to the hinge, and it’s working fine. The plastic is a little loose in that area, but it’s a lot better off than it was before.
So I guess I can hold off on getting a new laptop for a while, especially since I’ve been tweaking this one a bit more. I just started using cpudyn to throttle my CPU when the load isn’t high. Keep the temperature down, which is nice when I’m using it on my lap.
Just as I’m starting to feel better with my spine and all, my laptop decided to take a turn for the worst. The left hinge between the base and the LCD panel had started breaking a few months back, part of the plastic casing had cracked and fallen off. Today the remaining piece broke, so the panel is no longer attached to the hinge on that side. And, of course, that’s the side were the power and data connection to the LCD are.
So, I’ve got 3 options with my laptop now. Do nothing, and keep using it until the the remaining hinge breaks or the cables in the broken hinge get messed up to the point of the laptop being unusable. Or, I can send it off to Sony for repairs, which will most likely cost $800 (not including shipping), since they’ll most likely want to replace the LCD panel. Or, I can buy a new laptop. This last option has a certain appeal to it, as I’ve been kicking around the idea of a new laptop for a while now.
Specifically, I’ve been looking at the Dell Inspiron 9100. It’s a “desktop replacement” laptop, which means it’s big and heavy, but it’s got a fast CPU and a better graphics card than my current desktop. With the configuration I want it comes out to $1,875.10 after their 15% off special. But I don’t really have that kind of money just lying around at the moment. But it also seems kindof silly to pay almost half that to repair a 2+ year old laptop.
What to do?
September 10th, 2004
Chip
I’ve finally done the cutover on my personal site from chocobo.cx to 2bithacker.net. To go along with this, I’ve also started using kyzoku@2bithacker.net as my primary email address, instead of chip@chocobo.cx. Both still work for now, but I’m going to be putting a bouncer on the old one in the near future telling people to use the new one instead, and once the domain expires next summer, it’ll be gone for good.
In other geek news, I’ve been experimenting with some stuff on my laptop (now wraith.2bithacker.net instead of tonberry.chocobo.cx, for anyone who cares) including switching from the XFree86 X Server to the X.Org Server. The new 6.8.0 release has a bunch of neat features, including real window transparency and drop shadows, however neither work very well on my laptop. I suspect it’s because I have so little video memory and I run at 1400×1050 at 24-bit. Ah well, I’ll have to try it on my desktop sometime.
Oh yeah, and I now have a phone line at the apartment. It’s a VoIP line from VoicePulse. So far it seems to be working out pretty well.
