All the upgrade planning for NanjingUSA to a 8202-E4B (IBM Power 720 Express) is done and have a scheduled arrival date of 10/14/2011.
Since I have a couple of weeks before install / upgrade (10/28/2011) I decided to drink the cool aid and nuke the Motion Computing LE1600 tablet. The tablet is six years old and I retired it two years ago when I won a ASUS PC1000 net book online.
The LE1600 was really running slow and I knew I needed to refresh Windows XP but was never really motivated. I located the box with software LE1600 came with and found they were still shrink wrapped. I dug up the external DVD drive and proceeded to load the Motion rescue CD. I forgot just one thing, I have a Bluetooth keyboard for the tablet but it is not usable until after I reload the OS and drivers. No problem, right? Wrong, the keyboard for my desktop is PS2, can you believe that? I guess over the years with laptop's and net books I never upgraded the HP desktop. Nanjing gave me a Core2 but no keyboard.
How unfortunate, I now have to go to Best Buy and get a keyboard, such a burden. :) Since I am driven not to buy just one item in my favorite store, I shall also buy a copy of Windows 7 Upgrade for the Core2 Desktop.
With all the tools now acquired I proceeded with refreshing the LE1600. I deleted the partition and created a new one. Formatted the 60GB drive and let the software do the rest. The process may be time consuming but totally painless. I was not worried about losing any data since I had migrated all to the HP desktop a couple of years ago. I manually installed the Bluetooth drivers but everything else just loaded fine. All the drivers and software is available on Motion Computing's website. I loaded up Chrome and the Logitec notebook webcam and now I have an extra web cam enabled device.
Now I will be able to Hangout with myself on Google Plus! It is really weird to have the two web cams going, one on each side. I move my head to the right and the other goes left. Yes, I am a little over the edge on this one but it's fun.
Now on to my second challenge, upgrade Windows XP to Windows 7. Since there is no upgrade path I will have to blow away XP and do a custom install of 7. I down loaded the Microsoft Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor which informed me that everything will upgrade except for the Web Cam and IBM Access 5.4. The advisor provided me a link for the Web Cam software and iSeries Access will have to wait until tomorrow. Jason received the first box from IBM last Friday with the iSeries Access 6.1 software.
The upgrade was the easiest I have ever done. One of the driving reasons to upgrade was to be able to install a third monitor, Dell 15" LCD to go with my dual 19" Samsung SyncMasters. When NanjingUSA sent me the Core2 it came with on board video only. My old HP has a dual monitor card that I acquired 6 years ago and designed for a AGP slot. The Core2 does not have any AGP slots but does have PCIe slots a x1 and x16. I have been so busy with AS/400 and business operations that I missed when PCIe slots became standard, just blink and technology will pass you by.
After a little research I settled on a ATI Radeon HD 5450 DMS59 for $120.00. This little jewel has the capability of three monitors if using a Display Port with VGA Active Adapter. I only missed one little fact, windows XP does not support 3 monitors.
A couple of hours later I am running Windows 7 and loving it. The HD 5450 is awesome. There was absolutely no problem installing 7.
Now all the fun of reloading all the software starting with WDSC 6.0...........
Happy Columbus Day!
Have a great week everyone!
~Richard
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