HP ProBook Memory Upgrade

I recently went to install a memory upgrade into an HP ProBook 4320s and was surprised to find that this involved having to remove multiple screws and the keyboard.

To get to the memory slots on the HP ProBook:

1. Remove the battery from the bottom of the computer (well, I was going to do that anyway.)
2. Remove four screws that are in the battery compartment
3. Flip the computer over so that you are looking at the keyboard.
4. Slide the bezel (with the power button on it) back towards the display.  It sticks, but it will slide back.
5. Remove the bezel.
6. Under the bezel, there are six screws that are readily accessible.  Four are black and two are silver.  Remove the four black screws.
7. Slide the keyboard back towards the display and twist it to the side. This exposes the two ram slots.
8. Drop the memory into the available slot and reassemble the machine.

I have gotten rather used to servicing laptops with easy one-screw "bottom of the chassis" access to both the memory and hard drive, so I expected this upgrade to be a lot easier.  It has been a while since I have had to dig for the memory slots on a laptop. 

It looks like the hard drive is buried even deeper.

The Joy of Patching

For the last couple of months I have read various reports saying Windows XP SP3 will be released in the near future and I have to say that it is none to soon.

This week I helped a co-worker setup a new Dell D630 laptop that thankfully arrived with XP, not Vista. I found that Dell is still building these machines with aging image, which includes IE 6 and Windows Media Player 9.

After taking the machine out of the box, I immediately loaded antivirus software and then went out to visit the Windows Update site. It turns out that this nice new laptop needs a total of 44 High Priority Patches and 9 Software Patches to be current. And that is before we start loading any other software.

Last week while rebuilding a different machine with Windows XP with SP2, the first trip to the Windows Update site resulted in the need to download a total of 87 High Priority patches. Initially I tried to install all of the patches in one pass, but ended getting the machine stuck in an endless loop of the Microsoft XP Activation process. The only way out was to kill the partition and re-install XP. I then had to install the 87 patches in a number of smaller groups, instead of one fell swoop.

Hopefully Windows XP SP3 will reset the counter on the number of patches you have to apply to a fresh install of XP.

I remember first getting XP late in year in 2001, then getting XP SP2 about three and a half years ago. If XP SP3 is released in the next few months, does this mean that we have to wait until 2011 to see XP SP4? Or will Microsoft have succeeded in forcing Vista upon us by then?

Choosing a New Hard Drive

I went to the local Office Depot to pick up a new hard drive for a PC that I am rebuilding. As I have not really needed a drive recently, the specs that I had in my mind were: IDE interface , 7200 rpm, and a capacity of about 80 Gigabytes (GB).

I was correct on the first two options, but definitely off on the drive capacity.

I initially chose a Maxtor 160 GB model that was priced $72.99. Then I realized that they had a Maxtor 300 GB with a 16MB cache for only $84.99. As a bonus, the 300 GB drive had a sticker on the box that said the drive inside was actually a 320 GB.

Doubling the drive capacity for $12 seemed like a good idea, so I bought it. Now I have no idea what I actually need a 320 GB drive for, but I do know that it will get filled up. They always do.

I am quite sure that a couple of years from now I will be out at store looking at multi-terabyte (TB) drives trying to figure out how I survived so long without one. I definitely remember this being the case when the hard drives grew from megabytes into gigabytes.