I spent this morning watching Big Clive tearing down a cheap USB charger which, for unfortunate part-failure reasons – passed mains straight through to the USB port. Sadly for the makers, who actually seem to have given a fig about design – and who’ve actually gone to more trouble than seems common to build a reasonable piece of kit, they were let down by a parts failure.
Anyhow, the thing is gently soothing to me, reminding me of sitting reading while my dad would strip down and repair electronics.
So it finally got me motivated to try and move the cable from the knock-off apple supply (which said “MagSafe” but actually appears to provide the full 85W regardless of whether it’s connected or not) to the old apple one I had which had a faulty cable. I’ve got an array of toys here now, most importantly in this case my temperature controlled iron which was complete overkill (and proved I need a different tip for it – so I’ve added some new tips to the selection of stuff that I’ve got in my AliExpress cart…for later).
Anyhow. The general impression when I stripped the knock-off one down was that it was poorly made:
Although I didn’t get in to actually looking at the design. After a fair chunk of time and a bit of a battle I managed to desolder the apple cable and replaced it with the one from the knock-off – which seems to be working nicely. The poor apple brick is now held together with tape tho’.
I also trekked out to return the case I bought from Blinq – they turned out to be very nice people, giving me a chunk of refund for the massively delayed motherboard delivery – and promising to refund the money from the case that was smashed in transit.
Also, the nice guy at the FedEx place taped the box shut for me, when I asked about tape :)
Then I headed over to what has become my favourite computer store and started peering at cases – explained my predicament (i.e. it normally lives out of sight, so I want something that’s functional, has lots of bays, and is also fairly cheap) – and they produced a second hand case for $45. Bargainateous, if you ask me.
Having got home I commenced the joyous task of rebuilding my PC using a new motherboard but the same everything else – not really an upgrade, more a side-grade.
Once thrown into the new case, it booted straight up and seems, surprisingly, pretty happy. I’ve now started trying to sort out the pigging mess the file systems had become – with the spurious resetting problem seemingly better (it just moved 160 Gig of files in one go, and before that another 90 Gig), it’s looking like it might be possible to at least get it working and the files back where they belong. Once that’s done I can start contemplating the possibility of sorting out a raid array for it.