Weekend Work - Saturday, July 26

First thing this morning, Chris stopped by. His father wasn't doing well and he has been checking in on him in Fort Worth. He stayed here at the office for about 20 minutes and had to get on along.

A customer of mine dropped off his brother-in-law's (BIL) HP PC. It was a 600mhz model with 64mb RAM. He had tried to upgrade it to XP, but it locked up and would need a reinstall. Reviewing the specs, I explained it would be painfully slow *if* we could get XP to install on 64mb RAM. I recommended a RAM upgrade at a minimum.

I offered another solution that might make more sense. I had a used PC that was much, much faster with XP Home already installed. It would make more sense to go this route.

He would check with his brother-in-law and let me know.

I got a call from a guy who used to be involved with the Graham Fire Department. He may still be, I am not sure. He wanted to downgrade from Windows Vista Home Premium to Windows XP Home. He had the disks and the license, but wasn't sure how to proceed. I explained it would involve backing everything up and then reformatting and installing XP. At that point, once all of the Windows updates had been applied, it would mean moving the data back into the correct places. It wasn't something one can just toss a disk in and do, it must be planned to assure you have the drivers before hand to get back online as well as the disks and license for the software you use daily so it can be reinstalled.

He said he would drop it by tomorrow.

A former boss from Graham Auto Electric arrived with his Toshiba notebook in hand. It seems one of the grandkids might have spilled something on the keyboard. Several of the keys were stuck down with some kind of 'gunk'. He also had a bad memory slot and wanted to add the largest stick of RAM into the only working slot the PC had.

I explained it would be best to get a new keyboard for the stuck key issue. In the past, on a notebook given to me that had soda spilled on the keyboard, I 'washed' the keyboard in hot water and allowed it to air dry (after swinging the keyboard back and forth, forcibly, to remove the excess water). That worked then and it might work not to get him by until the new keyboard arrived.

It was a good possibility I had the RAM in stock to upgrade the notebook. He left it with me to see what I could find out.

The Fire Department guy who called arrived with his Dell C521 PC and the XP Home media, licenses and other applications. I told him I would get it done today and he could pick it up tomorrow morning. He had a golf appointment mid-day tomorrow, so that would work out perfect.

I called the lady who owned the used PC and told her someone was interested in it. She agreed to the asking/offer price. I took it over to the workbench and fired it up to update it with the most current Windows updates.

While the machine was updating I got a call from the guy who was interested in the used PC and he stated his BIL had worked a deal to get a used PC from his nephew. Having the used PC on the bench, I continued the updates anyway.

We decided it was time for some lunch and opted to grab some BBQ from Clayton's BBQ. If I was running a BBQ joint and served up the meal we received, I would shut down the place. We both ordered brisket with various sides. The brisket arrived *full* of fat with no hint of a smoke ring and absolutely no bark. You BBQ lovers will know what I am talking about. The meal we received was somewhat cold, the meat was gray and there was no taste of smoke whatsoever. The saving grace was the sauce. They have two kinds, a sweet and a regular sauce. The sweet sauce was pretty good and made eating the food palatable.

If it has just been the meat, I might have went back, but the sides were equally bad. The beans were cooked *way too long*, the remnants of bacon used to flavor them looked like a rubbery, burned piece of leather shriveled up. The potato and macaroni salad tasted like it was out of a can to me.

Oh, well. Some of the caveats of living in a small town, lack of choice. Back to work.

I started working on the Vista-to-XP migration by backing up the drive data. It took several hours to complete. I popped in the XP Home CD and reinstalled XP.

About 4:00 I got a call from a lady who needed a used PC for work. This was her lucky day. I explained I had the one on the bench and it wasn't mine, but the lady who owned it wanted to sell it. She agreed to it and I told her I would make it ready for her.

I took the keyboard out of the Toshiba and ran it under hot water in the sink. I don't condone this by any means, but we knew it would need a new keyboard, so it wouldn't hurt to at least see if the PC would start up later.

While I was cleaning it up, it appeared the 'gunk' was fishing 'stink' bait. At least, it smelled that way. I got all of the 'gunk' out and whipped the keyboard about outside to remove the excess water. I then used compressed air to blow out even more water and left it attached to the front of the fan to force air into the unit. I would leave it overnight to dry and test it tomorrow.

Kathy and I went to eat around 7:45 pm and I came back afterward and finished the updates on the Vista-to-XP machine and found the used PC was sitting at a blue screen of death (BSOD).

Rats. What could be wrong.

I turned it off and it would not come back on. I did some troubleshooting and found it was a bad memory stick. I replaced the stick and it fired back up. I put the 'bad' stick in and it wouldn't boot.

Now, I would have to tell the owner of the PC that her profit margin just got smaller since she would have to buy a new stick of RAM to sell the PC.

I finished up the Vista-to-XP migration, applied all Windows updates and moved his data back. I dialed up to his ISP to confirm everything was working and called it a night about 10:20 pm.