Weekend Nerdery Project

I keep talking about projects. Last week, I got a lot done - a lot - and I don't intend for this weekend to be any different. One of the things that I accomplished last week, against my better judgment, was to buy some computer equipment. I got:

a horribly overpriced Ethernet cable - $29.99

Rocketfish 3.5" Hard Drive Enclosure kit - $60.99

A buddy at work was able to provide me with an Ethernet cable for free, so one of my missions for Saturday will be to return the horribly overpriced cable, still in its packaging. In addition to these two items, there are a few other things pictured.

my current laptop

my old computer, an HP Pavilion 6460, circa 1998

my first laptop, a HP Pavilion Notebook N3350, circa 2000

a Linksys LNE100TX EtherFast 10/100 LAN Card, circa 2000

a SanDisk Cruzer Mini 256MB flash drive, circa 2003

a SanDisk Cruzer 4GB flash drive, circa 2008

the August 2007 and January 2009 issues of Maxim Magazine, both of them featuring Hilary Duff - those have nothing to do with the project, they're just for show

Hauling some of this crap out and setting it up brings back memories. The laptop was a gift from my family's business for graduation so that I could use it in college, and it got me through five years of college and more, particularly from July of '04 through to Summer of '05 when my desktop machine was inoperable. I bought the LNE100TX around the same time so that I could connect to the network at the fraternity house, which lasted for all of a week before I moved out. That was late Summer, early Autumn of 2000. It's Spring of 2009, and I literally just removed the shrink wrap. Most of my blog posts from December of 2004 to June or July of 2005 were written on the N3350, and most of the rest from then until July of '07 were written on the 6460. If I remember correctly, the Cruzer Mini was a Christmas gift from my grandparents for Christmas of 2003, and I'm pretty sure that it went to England with me.

So, where am I going with this? Simple: I'm going to partially backup, and partially revitalize my old computer. In the process, I'm going to give myself a sort of partial crash course in computer hardware, which is something that I've had almost no experience with since around 1996 - the end of middle school. The only time I've really set up any hardware since I was in middle school, beyond just hooking a computer up, was back in August or September of 2007 when I set up my cable modem and Netgear WGR614 wireless router (pictured). I had to give myself a similar crash course in modern information technology with an emphasis on network security when I arrived here in Old Dominion, so this is sort of a continuation of that process. So, what exactly am I going to do?

I currently have the old computer up, running ScanDisk.

Once ScanDisk is complete, I'll run defrag.

Once both of these are done, I'll shut the thing down and install the Ethernet card.

After that, I'll probably move the router and cable modem into the bedroom so that the Ethernet cable will reach easier.

From there, I'll hopefully be able to network the two computers together through the router. Assuming I can get the systems networked, I should theoretically be able to share files back and forth, and back the necessary ones up.

Whether that works or not, I'll remove the hard drive from the old computer, install it into the USB enclosure kit, and hook it up to the new computer for virus scanning. Even if the Ethernet setup doesn't work, the hard drive kit should.

At some point, maybe this weekend, I'll purchase a 500GB USB hard drive for the purpose of backing up files from the 6460, the N3350, and my current system.

This entire process, which should only take some time tonight and the bulk of Saturday, should get me familiarized with basic networking and basic hardware upgrades. That's an exceptionally good thing. Also, when all's said and done, I'll have some important and irreplaceable files and content backed up, and I'll be able to wipe that content off of my old hard drive and start using it as a platform for playing old computer games (and old Nintendo ROMs) that can't be played on a modern system. I'm pretty excited about that, ladies and gentlemen!

So, I'll be working on that for the rest of the night, and most of tomorrow. It's a good weekend project for me, it will accomplish something that I need to do and that I've been meaning to do for months, and the Crypto King believes that it's within my level of capability. So, I'll probably report on that for Monday's post. If you're one of my friends on Facebook, I'll be updating a photo album throughout the weekend as I work on the project, step by step.

Here I go...