The Insomniac Coder

Laptop Design For Disassembly - Slashdot I don't even think it needs to be so extreme, but there is absolutely no excuse for the parts of the laptop that become obsolete faster to take more than a couple of minutes to swap. I swapped a drive on a one-year old Dell and all it took was to remove two screws and a third one that held a plastic fascia in place. It took maybe 5 minutes. As nice as it was, except for the hard drive , DVD and RAM , almost nothing else in the laptop can even be swapped. How come the networking, wireless and GPU are not built into pluggable modules like the ones that fit into the ExpressCard slot? I know GPUs have cooling issues, but I am sure that this should take no more than designating one of these slots only for the GPU and add the proper heatsinks to it. The other things like the networking and wireless cards should have absolutely no trouble fitting and working in this form factor. My laptop is one year old, and after upgrading RAM and switch...

I just finished installing the last part of my birthday present (at least according to Ivette), a dual monitor stand for my company-issued 23" screen and the 24" screen I scored last week (the first part of the birthday present). The photo is shot too wide, which distorts the position of the right monitor, in reality it is aligned perfectly with the left one. Some annotations: A: I put a round metal plate above the clamp to spread some of the load on the top surface of the desk (F). This was not needed underneath since there is a metal frame available to handle the load. The desk can take the aggregated load with no issue whatsoever, but I felt nervous about clamping 50 or so pounds of load over less than 16 square inches of plastic.  B: Verizon -issued FIOS router.  C: Comcrap PVR, about to get ditched unless Comcrap starts showing me some love. I am not kidding, you assholes are one phone call away from losing my TV account to Verizon FIOS TV.  D: Dell work l...