Our RV Adventures

Today started off dim and quiet. Dim because the shades and front curtains were closed when I got up, and quiet because Jan woke up with a migraine and I was trying to keep it down.

Once she had her coffee, she took a Sumatriptan and laid back down for a while. As for me, I quietly got back to work on another laptop hard drive replacement.

This one was a Dell XPS 15 that I picked up from a long time client the last time we were down in the League City area. But as it turned out this one was a bit strange.

Dell is really good about support, so you use the Service Tag number on the bottom to go online and find out exactly what your laptop had in it when it shipped. And this tag# told me the laptop had a 1 TB Western Digital HDD inside, so that’s what I ordered as a replacement. And the replacement came to Brandi’s this past Sunday while we were there for Chris’ birthday party. Love Amazon’s Free Sunday Delivery.

So my first step was to remove the laptop bottom panel so I could get to the hard drive.

Removing six screws loosens the back. Then you can open the small silver panel, and remove the two screws underneath. And that where the first strangeness showed up.

One of the two screws was missing. And the only way that would be is if someone had taken the back off. Removing the one remaining screw gave me access to the hard drive. That’s it on the right.

Removing four more screws and I could pull out the HDD frame.

After removing the four frame screws and the data connector, I had the old HDD in my hand. And now the second strangeness.

These two drives should be identical, but they’re not. The one on the left, the one I removed from the machine, is a Seagate 750 GB, not the 1 TB WD it should be. At this point I put in a call to the owner and left a voicemail, before preceding with the swap out.

Ten minutes later, I had the new drive in and the case back together. Then I plugged in my Win7 USB Installer and booted it up.

Twenty minutes later Windows 7 was up and running, and I was downloading the necessary drivers from the Dell site.

Unlike the HP laptop a couple of weeks ago, Dell tells you exactly what drivers you need and lets you download them all at once.

About this time the client called back, and I confirmed that she had bought the laptop new, and that no one had worked on it until this problem. But, before she called me, not knowing if we were in town, she took it into Best Buy to have them look at it.

They kept it a few days, and then said it wasn’t fixable. So then she called me.

At this point the only thing that makes sense is that Best Buy found the original bad HDD and replaced it with another one. But I think it was one they just had lying around, and a used one at that. The date code on the HDD is two years older than the date code on the computer itself.

But I guess they didn’t know that the used drive was also dead. At this point they figured there must be something else wrong that they couldn’ fix, and sent it back. But with the new correct HDD installed, it’s working now.

Next up tomorrow, Windows 10.

By 4:30 Jan was feeling a lot better, and was hungry because all she’d had was some potato chips. So we headed into Columbus to have dinner at Los Cucos Mexican Restaurant, one of our favorites.

I got the Beef Fajitas Poblanas, with mushrooms, poblano strips, and red onions, in a delicious heavy cream sauce. Really good.

Jan had her favorite Beef Fajita Stuffed Avocado. She says it’s the best she’s ever had.

And even better we had plenty left over for tomorrow.

Thought for the Day:

“It was a woman who drove me to drink, and I’ve been searching thirty years to find her and thank her.” – W. C. Fields

gfgsfgsfdg

After getting some coffee in me this morning, I got to work on fixing my satellite problem. Yesterday when I got everything set up, I found I only had one tuner active. My first thought was maybe this was the original problem with my ‘found’ Winegard Satellite Dome, and was the reason it was discarded.

But a quick swap of the cables at the dish told me it was a cable problem, since the problem followed the cable. So now I went along, checking each connector for bent center pins, etc., but finding no obvious problems.

Deciding to put aside further troubleshooting until later, and just get things working again. So I got out my 60 foot extension cables and ran them directly from the dish, in through the driver’s window, and to the receiver. And that got everything working again. I’ll ring out the cables a little later and figure out what’s wrong.

Well, our power problems are back once again, and now I think I’ve finally got a handle on what’s causing them. And the culprit is . . .

Low voltage.

To recap, every time we park in this inner ‘A’ circle, we have problems with the power popping off in the afternoons, especially when Jan is cooking, and running both the microwave and the toaster oven. But the problem only occurs in this area. Not at any other park, not in areas ‘C’ and ‘D’ here, not even right across the road (it’s on a different circuit).

But this afternoon when the power popped off, nothing extra was running, just the TV, computer, and both AC’s. In the past it took something like starting the microwave while all this was also running.

But Serendipity revealed what was going on this time. As the power went off, I was walking toward the front of the coach and looking right at the voltmeter located over the driver’s seat. This shows the rig AC voltage, whether from shore power or the genset.

Normally this meter is kind of blocked by the satellite cables running to the back of the receiver, but since I had temporarily moved the wires around this morning, I could see the meter as the power came back on.

Now my Progressive EMS (Electrical Management System) will drop out at 108 volts to protect things like AC compressors from damage from low voltage. Most other things in the rig would not be adversely affected.

So I turned the AC’s off and then going outside I flicked the switch that put my EMS in bypass mode, which meant that it was no longer monitoring the voltage.

A little bit later I saw this.

As the afternoon wore on, the voltage gradually started to rise, ending up about 113 volts by sundown. And at 1 am it now shows this.

The only kind of weird thing about this my Progressive EMS normally shows when it drops out due to a problem, and it did this time. But when I checked it after the first occurrence a month or so ago, it didn’t show an error, so I never checked it again. And that kind of confused things as I looked at the problem.

Tomorrow I’ll take my photos down to the office and get them on the problem.

Thought for the Day:

I’ve finally decide that there’s nothing wrong with me. It’s the world that has issues.

asdfadfa