Unauthorized Latitude E5500 upgrades

… or how to upgrade it beyond recognition 🙂 I found an abandoned Latitude E5500 notebook on a shelf while visiting a customer. Being in good relations with them, I asked about the notebooks status and why it was lying there in a stack of other notebooks. “They’re just junk” I was told. Hmm, one mans junk is another mans gold. Read on for a great upgrade adventure. (more…)

Continue ReadingUnauthorized Latitude E5500 upgrades

Upgrading Sony Vaio VPC F11S1E with SSD …. and HDD!

I just got my hands on an used Sony Vaio VPC F11S1E. It’s a really nice 16.4″ true HD model, with BluRay and Nvidia 330M graphics card. I got it, because it got really really hot, the noise levels were unbearable and also the HDD turned out to be defective.

On my never ending quest to do some fun upgrades, I disassembled it completely and cleaned out the dust and grime in the radiator and fans inside. Also I gave it some new thermal paste, which got the noise level somewhat down.

The HDD had to be replaced with a SSD drive, ofcourse, and I had just bought a Force 3 120GB drive. It’s SATA3 6.0Gb/s and should perform around 500MB/sec. The Sony only runs SATA2, but hey, but then at least the drive won’t be the bottleneck. Also I had a nice 1TB drive lying around, and thought the 120GB for both Windows XP, Windows 7 and Ubuntu might be a bit small if I also needed somewhere to place some data.

So why not try to fit both?

(more…)

Continue ReadingUpgrading Sony Vaio VPC F11S1E with SSD …. and HDD!

RAID 1E recovery the hard way

Manual IBM ServeRAID recovery of a broken RAID1E setup – using Linux, hexedit, custom scripts – and coffee!

Yesterday I was called to a customer with a broken down IBM xSeries 232 server. The powersupply was gone, and the machine was rebooting every two minutes. Also it had 6 drives in a RAID setup with one marked as faulty (id 2). Oh – and did I mention the last backup was sometime last year?

(more…)

Continue ReadingRAID 1E recovery the hard way