Nicks Birthday Computer

 All Nick wanted for his birthday was a new computer.  Since the newest computer in our house is from 2013 I think it is probably time.  He is doing some amazing things on there and it would help him out to have a little more power.

Luckily Jen cousin was around to lend a hand, since I haven't built a computer in a long time.  Still pretty much the same, but reassuring to have more eyes on the process.

Everything went well and Nick is happy with the new blazing performance.  No GPU's to be had at this time, so we had to go with integrated graphics for now.  But still a massive upgrade!

3D Printer Fun

 We recently got back from a trip to Colorado and Arizona.  Before we left I challenged Nick to design a robot dog for Maddie.  I said that I would get them a 3d printer once his design was complete.  Well he whiped out a design in a couple days and we decided to wait till we got back to buy one.

Of course the second we got back they wanted to get it, and we didn't have anything to do so we drove over to Microcenter and picked up a Ender 3D Pro, which Nick had scoped out and I reviewed.  It was very affordable and seemed to be highly regarded.

We put it together this morning in about a hour and a half.  It went together pretty easily and once the bed was leveled it has been happily printing away for awhile now.

Hoping we can get a lot of good use out of it!

Keyboard Replacement

Recently my Father-in-Law passed away.  My Mother-in-Law doesn't have a use for his old computer, so we thought Maddie could use it.  The issue is that the keyboard is in pretty bad shape, some of the keys don't work well and the W key is missing entirly.  So I thought it would be a good time to get Maddie to help me replace the keyboard.  It is pretty amazing how easy it is to purchase a keyboard and install it.  How many computer have gone to the dump because people didn't think to replace it.

The laptop is a Dell Latitude E7450, so we ordered this keyboard from Amazon: https://amzn.to/3aWwKVo

Maddie and I worked together to pull the old one off and install the new one.  Here is a link to the you tube video we followed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQE-1jy1eB4

The only tricky thing is the that cables on the new keyboard seemed a little long, but we just pushed the battery down on them and it is working well, so they must slide around a little.

Hard drive died!

So the hard drive in our family computer stopped working, bios screen stuck.  :(

I ordered a replacement SSD from best buy and picked it up on my way home.  It is twice the size of the old one.

I wanted to try a cloning tool I got, so I put in the HD from our other computer and cloned it to the new drive.  It was done in about 15 minutes.

Once I installed the new SSD, the computer came right up.  Awesome.

I was able to go into drive manager and extend the drive so it used the full size.  Looks like I could provide another service to my neighbors :)