| As a small kid, I was fascinated with electrical or electronic things. I tend to try to take them apart and then put them together. And sometimes, I was unsuccessful getting it to work. In elementary school, I read a book about transformers on how they work. In other words the principals of transformer operation. In the drawing, they indicated a transformer with only 20 turns of wire for the primary which is across 110 volts AC. I decided to try to built one. When I finally did built one, and pluging it in. All I was getting was a short-circuit, lot of sparks and a loud hum . At that time, I did not understand that you can't do it with just a coil of just 20 turns of wire across 110 V AC. As I grow older I discovered that that wasn't enough inductance to prevent a short-circuit. Usually, an iron core transformer on the primary would have up to thousands of turns for the primary across 110 V AC @60 hertz. The only kinds of transformer that would only need a few turns would be a powder iron or ferrite core on a switching power supply that operates at high frequency at 100 kHz. Those kinds of power supply transformer are found in most consumer electronics specially computers and 12 V DC to 110 V AC power inverters. They are being used more and more, because of a greater power efficiency. The only problem with them is, they are not easy to repair Those kind of systems utilize transistors to switch the power on and off rapidly. When they do fail by shorting out, the transformer acts like a dead short across the line. The whole system may burn up, if it wasn't for the line fuses.
I have been tinkering with this old computer( HP Pavilion 6330), such as improving the performance. In its original form, this computer was lousy performer. It constantly was locking up on us to a point, where the only way to restore operation was to push the power button or unplug the thing. And we also have to constantly in a couple of months, reinstall the operating system in order to to get it work right. What a big difference this new motherboard on this system makes along with brand-new operating system . This system has became so stable as compared with before that it is a joy to use.
I've also built a much better computer to replace this one that I use every day. And this computer sits directly to the left of the old one. My old computer is my spare computer now.
My future computer will be no less than a 62-bit quad core one or better. Future Microsoft operating system beyond Windows Vista will only come in 64-bit only. Presently, Microsoft hopefully will release the next Windows operating system code-named Windows 7, perhaps around 2010. I hope, that new operating system will perform better than Windows Vista. The only problem in my opinion with Windows Vista is that it's very resource intensive requiring more memory, a faster processor as comparing with windows XP. Also, there are drivers issues such as bugs and requiring all new programs in order to run. Only thing I like about Windows Vista is the new users interface. Windows Vista runs extremely well on my Pentium 4 computer, although not as good as Windows XP.
I managed to construct my dream computer and it's the overclocked Intel core i7 default clocked at 4.5 GHz with a peak clock of 4.9 GHz. At the present time, it's the fastest computer I ever owned. It runs on the 64-bit Windows 7 with 16 GB of RAM.
I've also tried Ubuntu Linix 8.04 using the Wubi Installer on my junk computer just to fool around with. With this variant of Linix it is possible to dual boot with Windows and to uninstall it without affecting the Windows installation. My problem was, I wasn't able to get the wireless WiFi network card to work so I can download driver updates as well as programs. So I gave up on that for now and uninstalled it. I will try again in the future after getting hold the Broadcom driver for my network card. When you uninstall Ubuntu, it saves a backup copy on your hard drive so you can always reinstall it in the future. The backed-up Ubuntu installer file appears to be exactly the way it was when first downloaded. When I uninstall it, it do not affect the Windows installation at all. |
