Installations

We had an order come to an Amazon Locker in Morgan Hill and picked it up on Monday. It included a new fan for Carl's laptop. The old fan had been getting louder and louder and we figured it was eventually going to give out. Tuesday was the day to do the fan replacement.

Carl had read that it should be a 20 minute job... so we figured it would take about 2 hours...

Bottom of laptop opened up - old fan is still in place, new fan in its plastic bag on top of the DVD/CD drive.

New fan in place -- it required careful access to small components

Here's a picture of Carl plugging in the new fan... this was actually during a debugging phase - it initially appeared that the new fan was not working, but he figured out that it was getting power and coming on momentarily, but then figuring out that no cooling was required and turning off.

Closing up the bottom...

All the screws neatly laid out on a paper towel with relative locations reflecting the area of the bottom of laptop where they needed to go back.

The replacement of the fan actually only took about 20 minutes, but when Carl got it all back together, his Windows operating system would no longer connect to our MiFi (internet) device. He ran various check programs, booted a Linux operating system, ran some more checks, and eventually booted Windows again (several hours later) and it connected to the MiFi with no problem. He thinks that running Linux may have reset the hardware -- he is just happy it is working now. His laptop is SO quiet - we had not realized how loud the fan had gotten!

We also went to the Walmart in Gilroy to look for bins to use to complete our "far side of the wet bay" project. If you remember when I last blogged on this...

This was the way that the bay looked with the shelves in place and our old / substitute boxes in place.

We were able to find two different sizes of the same design baskets at Walmart (they look like they are woven, but they are plastic so easy to clean if needed). We weren't really looking for a "good look" to the bay, but they do look nice!

Just a couple of more "bay" projects to complete, and then I think we can take time off from bay improvements!