DC jack repair guide
After less than 2 years of use, my vpr Matrix 175B4 laptop (a rebadged Samsung P10) began to spark and shut down repeatedly as the condition of the faulty DC power jack on the motherboard worsened. The laptop became unusable. At the time, I was determined not to throw away my former perfectly functioning laptop due to the failing $2 part. Failing DC power jacks and or plugs at the time (~2006) seemed to be common problems on many laptops according to the forum posts on HP, Toshiba, etc. For the repair, I used an excellent disassembly guide originally posted on the vpr Matrix forum.
Download repair guide
This guide has also been posted at Repair4Laptop: Do-It-Yourself Laptop and Notebook Upgrading, Modding and Repairing. They may have repair guides for your laptop if you stumbled across my site on a Google search. I can report that my laptop has continued to work for about 7 years since the external jack repair. I never bothered to replace the laptop batteries that had already died by the time of the repair. Ironically, a few months after the repair the original 256Mb stick of memory failed. Luckily, I still had a 512Mb stick that worked fine. The fans can be fairly loud, but otherwise the computer remains stable. It still has one of the best keyboards that I have used in any laptop—even after all these years.
I continue to run Linux. I use and love Openbox 3.4 as my window manager of choice. Openbox is truly amazing. I have a hard time using anything else. That said, there are many window managers that I have yet to try. It is hard to convey the enormity of options available to Windows and Mac users where they essentially do not have any choice in what window manager they use with their respective operating systems. I use Conky to keep track of my system. I also use mrxvt — a wonderful tabbed terminal. Of course, I usually have emacs running. Everything works. Even the firewire port is fully functional. I force my laptop to run at the lowest 1200MHz frequency, which thankfully usually keeps the fans running at their lowest speeds. My thought 7 years ago was that if I tried to reduce heat buildup, I might be able to prolong the life of the otherwise fairly warm CPU (1.7GHz Pentium IV). I would rather have a cooler computer than a marginally faster computer that has the exhaust fan spinning constantly at full speed.
Film photography
I love film. I have not found a substitute for
black & white film. For color film there is a saturation and depth
that is missing from any digital camera I have ever owned. Well, the
digital cameras I have owned have all been non-DSLR's, so the digital
purists will say the comparison is not close to being fair. However,
any somewhat decent film camera (used $50 to $100) can deliver the
quality of a $600 D-SLR. And I know, I will slowly pay the difference
with film and scan costs. Okay, maybe more than the difference in
cost. I still use digital cameras for snap shots
or when I can't afford to develop film (many times). I have a late
1940's - early 1950's era Ciro-flex TLR bought on ebay for around $25
with shipping. Luckily, there were no light leaks! Mine has a fairly
dim viewfinder and becomes nearly frozen in cold weather. I was
surprised that I got any images at all during this cold winter with
our >56 inches of snowfall. It is a completely manual camera. No
light meter. A casual understanding of the Sunny 16 rule is a must. I
have learned quite a bit by using Andrew Lawn's exposure calculator.
I am in no way an expert photographer, but I have a blast every time I
use this old camera. Even though there are only 12 shots per roll of
film, some of my most treasured photos have been taken with this camera.
When compared to digital encoding, there is something permanent with negatives that cannot be easily appreciated by digital files. Will everyone with DSLR's keep their photos over the next 20-100 years backed up and accessible for future generations? Negatives and prints can be easily visualized by future generations using their eyes whereas digital files need to be carefully archived. I have many old floppy disks full of papers and writings on computers that I no longer possess. Hopefully, computer software in the distant future will remain compatible with today's digital proprietary RAW formats and jpegs.
