Friday, November 27, 2009

Modding a crappy USD7 Logitech mouse for a little better performance.

So I had a budget for a mouse for general usage: RM30. So I bought this Logitech Mouse for RM25 or USD7.3 approx. The damn thing terrible. I broke my rule of test first before I buy when concerning mice and keyboards.

The Logitech's feet scrapped my Razer mouse pad and the scroll wheel had a soft scroll and a loud clack when it complete a spin-click. Which means the wheel floats a bit before next next notch.

So what do I do? Cry about it? Blow another RM40 for a new mouse? F**k no! I buy some mouse feet/skates and fix the suckers on! Increased the spring tension on the wheel and of course greased the wheel with some Vaseline so that the spring did not get stuck on the notches. Not to mention it no longer makes a cluck sound when it is spun.

Sunday, November 22, 2009

Fixing my Mom's friend Laptop.

Most of the people who I had to repair stuff for usually bring me their gear when it's about to die.In this case my mom's friend Lisa brought to me again her Dell Inspiration 500M laptop.
This problem with the sucker is that the keyboard is screwed. Now that wouldn't be a problem you say as we can just stick in a keyboard into the USB port. Well her brother, who was the previous owner, mangled both ports to the point that both are missing the plastic piece that the USB connectors sit on. And one port is missing a pin all together!

Naturally, she was using an USB PCMCIA card for the keyboard but on boot you can't use the keyboard until windows loaded. Which was the problem. Her XP bit it too. So I thought I just desolder those dead USB ports and solder in some used ones from my spare motherboards. After 20 screws later I decided I didn't want to strip the Dell Laptop just to solder in the USB ports since I most likely will spend another 2 hours more trying to screw the 60 screws back (well I don't know how many but it's a hell lot).
So I thought, "Why not just solder a USB cable to the pins?" So I bought a cable, stripped. Double checked pinoutsand soldered the wires to the pins. After a quick test and some insulation I hot glued the port for protection and strength. Here is the finished work.

X-Mini 2 and X-Mini Max 2 Video Review.

My review of the X-Mini 2 and my impressions of the Max 2.






Naturally, YouTube doesn't like 20 min videos so I had to cut it up. Yeah, annoying.