Everything is small and it's not easy to access the parts. The hard drive on the mini was located under the keyboard. Once I found the screws to remove the keyboard, I was able to remove the 120GB SATA hard drive. I replaced it with a 100GB one I had on hand and put Windows 7. Now the mini feels like a brand new system. I sure hope the soldier I fixed it for is enjoying it as I did this all for free.

I was also given a Sony Vaio that had Vista running on it but the owner wanted Linix Ubuntu and Windows 7 on it. This was fairly easy except for trying to find all the drivers that are compatible with Windows 7. Some of the Vista drivers on Sony's site did not work that great when it was running Windows 7, so I had to try a few different versions of the Vista drivers until it was working correctly. Hopefully manufactures will post Windows 7 drivers soon on their sites, but until then you just have to use the Windows Vista drivers and hope they work. In most cases they did. I didn't actually install Ubuntu on this machine as the Ubuntu image is bootable and will load with the full Ubuntu operating system. This will allow the owner to boot to Ubuntu off the CD, and if they want to, they can later install Ubuntu and ahave a dual boot system.


Here is a Gateway 400VTX laptop. It had 256MB of Ram and a 40GB drive that was bad. This system is a few years old, but other than that in fairly good shape. At first I wasn't sure if the drive was bad or not. I couldn't get it to boot so I tried using the drive as an external device with a special USB to IDE cable. I was unable to read the drive, so I threw it in my test case as an internal IDE drive. The drive was still unreadable. I tried simple checks like checkdisk, which failed. I then tried some different software I have to check disks, which failed as well. Before I gave up, I tried to format the disk and delete the partitions before I ran a very extensive test using SpinRite. Everything failed, even spinrite could not properly read the drive, so it went into the bit bucket (trash can for you non tech folks). Luckily for this user I had an extra 80 GB IDE drive laying around and an extra 256MB of RAM. I threw those in and tried to install Windows 7. That did not work out so good. At first I though everything was good until after a few reboots of trying to update the drivers. It seems that this laptop uses an older Intel graphics chipset that is not supported by Vista so therefore not supported by Windows 7. The best resolution I could get was 800x600, which looks terrible. Other than that, Windows 7 was running great. This was a big surprise to me as Microsoft released the minimum requirements for Windows 7 and stated that it needs at least 1 GB of memory. I had it running on 512MB of mem without any problems. Makes me wounder what other systems could run Windows 7.  Anyway, because of the graphic driver issue, I rolled the machine back to Windows XP SP3, and it seems to be running as good as it did when it was purchased.

It looks like I am getting long winded here so I just shorten down the rest of the re-cap of what I've been doing. 
Fixed a Cable modem network issue and helped get wireless range extended to top floor. Helped user update firmware on router and update drivers on PC so that his system was able to get online over wireless. Provided tips and information needed to make a new HD Television purchase at PX and provided on site support hooking up blueray player, satellite receiver, and new TV. Repaired 2 desktop systems that had bluescreen of death (BSoD) problem. Answered many tech questions over the phone and through the forum section here on the site.

Now here is the kicker. If I was to add up all the hours, equipment, on-site support, gas, and phone charges, my users would have had  $2000 or more in total for all this support. My total charge for all this support was free. Now that has to be the best deal anywhere for tech support, and my support is excellent. Now I want to be honest with you. I did receive some donations from the work I provided, and for those of you that donated I Thank You as you will end up making this great idea work. Now you may want to know how much I made with all the donations I received. So far I have made nothing. The reson being that there is some overhead costs to the support I provide like paying for hosting of this site, paying for gas for on-site support, phone charges, and paying for equipment, and that's OK. I'm not trying to make money. I love tech and this is my hobby. If I can help you while enjoying my hobby then we both make a great deal.

Keep checking back from time to time. I think I will continue to do a recap article every few weeks to keep everyone updated on what I have been doing. Thanks for checking out KMCTechGuy.