I will never fully understand why I get better Internet Speeds on a fresh install, but I do. Will the wonders never cease?

Results from Speakeasy Speedtest:

Last Result:
Download Speed: 3564 kbps (445.5KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 558 kbps (69.8 KB/sec transfer rate)

In the ongoing saga of keeping this poor laptop on life support, I just had to make a late-night run to Best Buy to purchase a new power cord because the old one just gave up the ghost.

Five years seems like a pretty good run for a power cord, but when it is a power cord for a laptop, that means an $80 purchase…ouch. I would have rather put that towards a new lappy.

And…to add insult to injury, the internal wireless card just went kaput. What the heck? Luckily, I had a Linksys PCMCIA card lying around so I am back up and running, but it leaves me with the burning question…What’s next?

So, today is kind of a sad day. I think this is the last time I will ever rebuild this lappy that I’m using to upload this blog post. It is getting very old and decrepit. It is and HP ze5375us. I don’t know if you can look that up, but if you can you will get a good idea about its age.

Last night, I was thinking and I decided that this laptop is probably eight five years old. EIGHT five YEARS OLD! As it goes with laptops, and especially one that is used as often as this one, that is pretty impressive. (Well less impressive once I found the original receipt and found out that this laptop is really only 5 years old…bummer.)

It looks old. There are little rubber band things that hold the LCD in place in the lid that have come loose behind the glass and make little S’s over the screen. The plastic place where you rest your hands when you type has been rubbed smooth. The left click button on the track pad has turned black because I have rubbed the silver off. The O key looks like a C key because some of the paint has rubbed off, and nearly every other key is smooth from use. I have to plug it in over and over for it to finally start taking a charge. The little rubber feet on the bottom have been gone for years. There is a large crack behind the screen on the lower left, no doubt from dropping my backpack with the laptop in it…probably should have lost the screen that day, but it survived. After about 10 minutes the left channel goes out on the sound card. The fans are sooo loud that my lappy sounds like a hover craft readying itself for take off, and they never, never turn off. The silver bezel that runs around the lower part is slowly turning from silver to black. The internal wireless card doesn’t support WPA encryption. The button on the front that is supposed to turn the wireless card still lights up, but doesn’t do anything else…it certainly doesn’t turn off the wireless card.

My Laptop is like an old comfortable pair of flip-flops that have the impression of your foot forever indented upon them. They are extraordinarily comfy but in the back of your mind, you know that their days are numbered.

I need some money to buy a new one. This one is on its last legs.

Over the past couple of weeks it has been beeping at me, not through the normal speakers, the internal speaker. I don’t know if I had some viruses or what, but it became very apparent that it was time for a rebuild. But, alas, this will be its last rebuild.

I am going to have to make a decision soon as to what kind of computer to buy. Should I buy an iBook, or some Windows box. I really want an iBook, but I don’t have no $1000 dollars, plus tax, to buy it.

Hopefully this thing lasts long enough to tide me over.

Hooking a laptop up to a Samsung HD television

Right now I have my laptop connected to my new Samsung HD television via an SVGA cable. You may ask me “Why would you want to do that?” Well, … ummm…. I know there has to be a good reason for this… Hey, I know I could watch those videos that I downloaded but won’t stream through the XBOX.

It works pretty good, but I did have a few problems out of the box. Here is how I fixed them.

First of all, you must be using the right resolution. If you don’t, the TV may show an image but something will be off. In my case, the right screen resolution is 800×600. I don’t have one of those new schmancy 1080P screens, but it looks pretty good!

When I had the resolution set to 1026×768 I got some strange strobing and the entire screen wasn’t displayed.

The second step I had to do was to go into the menu of the television and have it sync up to the signal. When I first plugged the computer into the tv, I got a signal, but it wasn’t aligned right on the screen. I did the sync step and the image was aligned, but I was getting the strobe…thus the whole resolution thing.

I have one remaining problem and that is how to get the image into native 16×9. If I use the 16×9 setting on the TV, it stretches and distorts the image. (My laptop is sending a 4×3 image.)

I went online to look to see if the drivers for the video card in this laptop have been updated, but alas the latest drivers were from 2004, before the crush of 16×9 monitors on the market. My video card assumes that the only monitor it would ever be hooked up to is a standard 4×3…drats!!!

That means if I want to watch a movie from my laptop on my schmancy HDTV, I will have both letterboxing and pillars. If you don’t know what that means, do a Google search…well let me save you the trouble. Simply put, it means that I have a big black square surrounding my video content….again drats!!!

With a quick upgrade of my laptop, I should be in business. And since I am swimming in an ocean of money, that shouldn’t be a problem….wait…..DRATS!!!

Oh well, at least I have a schnazzy new monitor to look at www.murdog.com.

By the way, even I am getting sick of the ’sch…’ thing. I believe I will stop that now!