With this ring, this silver hoop of wire, I bind your maiden mainstem just to keep you as a child.

Note: I am barely reading LJ of late. If you post something important or, alternately, something saying "tick this now or you're sooo off my list," I probably won't see it unless you email me or comment on a post of mine.

Tonight I am looking after an unwell redcountess (who has just changed medications, so it should be a fun few days) and taking the laptop apart at last. May I say how shockingly nice Compaqs are to work on, particularly after a Thinkpad 560X. (Which I must send a keyboard or at least keys for to tamaranth before I get a surface-to-air nudge.) The manual only lied once (about which side the external battery connector is on).

And I think I've found the problem: a surface-mounted component, could be a power conditioning coil or something, which has come unstuck. ( Here's a photo. )

I'm not really sure what it is (the service manual on the site doesn't include a full system board schematic) and I have NO IDEA how safe just resoldering it would be. Can anyone advise me on the wisdom of doing so?

I'm also slowly getting through the Whitby New Year photos (shots added to Wednesday-Friday and Sunday), including an MPEG of SNOW!!! outside Peterborough. Note, by the way, that all your direct links to individual images on these albums will no longer work as their positions in each album change. So there.

My problems getting my camera to talk to Linux or FreeBSD (or, as I discovered, Solaris 9 on a V210) appear to be because it was made on a Friday or something — arkady's of the same model works perfectly with her Thinkpad A30 and mine doesn't. How annoying. Though it still talks to all Macs or Windows boxes I've tried it on.