This is the USB modem I purchased about 5 months before the lightning strike. It was plugged into a rear USB port and had the phone line connected. All I use it for is an occasional FAX as phone modems are so obsolete, they are not installed in computers any longer. It was still hot to the touch hours after the strike. The circled areas are the burned components . The component board sets on...
Continue reading...Hobbies
A Bit More Gloom, but Clearing…
I just got the word back on my once wonderful Ten-Tec Omni VI amateur radio transceiver. It is a total un-repairable loss. <sniff> It was a wonderful radio for fifteen years. It was totally first class back then and still very much state of the art today, but not now, just fried silicon. Ten-Tec does make the next version in the series called the Omni VII. That design is about five years old. It loses...
Continue reading...Gloom, Despair and Agony on Me
Just like the Hee-Haw song, “If it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all.” I wrote a few entries back that I had to replace the 500 Gig hard drive in my lightning struck main computer. Not so bad at about $70.00. The new drive was an OEM version so a good price. Well, that NEW drive just failed. Yes, still under warranty but I had to schlep all the way back...
Continue reading...More Cubes, More HP, But Why?
The computer rebuild is over. The old box now contains a new AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition Deneb 3.2 GHz Socket AM3 Quad-core microprocessor. Wow, that’s a mouthful. What it means is it is state of the art (SOTA) for about a week or so… and impressive to computer geeks. The amazing part of the rebuild (required because of the lightning damage) is the $650 cost is far less than the cost of...
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