Garage Worthy

One time consuming aspect of the last project was the running back and forwards to my laptop to look up various technical points for the build, and I considered bringing the computer out to the workshop, but I considered there was no safe place to put it. The main bench was crowded and was used for packaging stuff for eBay, so it needed to be organized better.

A small, portable solution for good internet connection, fast web browsing, was researched.

It needed to be "garage worthy" and dependable, with a good battery life and WiFi, good screen, keyboard, trackpad and a big aspect of garageworthiness was that it had to be cheap as chips :

This Acer C720 Chromebook from around 2013 has found it's way onto my bench, and it should be noted that there are millions of these things in the market at the moment, millions...

Intel CPU, Celeron 2955U, Haswell, 4GB fixed ram, 16GB SSD (upgradeable) and a reasonable screen, keyboard and trackpad. In fact this trackpad, for workshop use, is very good as all actions can be achieved with two fingers of the same hand. 

A Chromebook uses ChromeOS and the target audience for these are schools, and as these units are no longer updated by Google, they have been replaced and therefore the C720 has become very cheap. I picked this one up for C$79.50 including taxes and Fedex shipping.

In my testing, browsing the internet is very quick, WiFi is strong, Youtube plays well, streaming is good and on top of that, battery life is around six hours or so. It is a perfect addition to the workshop and I expect it will also become a laptop for our hotel stays in the future.

Build Struggles post mortem

Just a quick update on the previous post, I was correct in assuming most of the struggles were down to that ASRock B450M motherboard, although there was a bad stick, or two, of DDR4 ram. The offending articles have been suitably disposed of, deep-sixed as far away as possible from the work zone, swimming with the fishes, gone walkies to the dark place.

In writing a post mortem, I have to acknowledge what good came out of my experiences with the build, basically lessons learned, there is always something to be gained from work done. 

One thing that has been obvious is that I discovered most of the issues with the motherboard when I had mostly finished the build, and completed the wiring "beautification" and although it all looked lovely, I was not happy with the end result, compromised and waiting to annoy me again at some point in the future.

So, lesson one, test components before assembly.

The second lesson is a bit more of a challenge, I had used the ram on another project and suspected it was questionable, but then assumed it was incompatible with that motherboard. I should have marked it as potentially dodgy going into this build. This lesson is more difficult for my aging brain as there are so many pieces of electronic stuff in the workshop that I find it almost impossible to keep track, so I suppose the lesson is I should make some notes or mark items somehow.

The last comments though are a big positive for me, I took my time, I did not get frustrated and I managed to diagnose the issues, even though the project was a failure, in the words of the great Charlie Sheen, I was definitely in the zone of "winning" during the time spent on the project.

Although granted, they are many hours of my life that I will never get back.