December 30th: Robotics Duties, Buying Parts For My Laptop, and Re-Pasting My School Laptop

Today was OK.

I got out of bed at 11:30am, again! I woke up at 9:30 but I didn't want to get out of bed until 11:30.

Anyways, throughout the day I created more practice exercises for the programming sub-team of the Robotics team. Since many people are at different places in their understanding of C++, I have to make a lot of resources for them to learn.

At 4, I got on my bike and went to Walgreens to buy a 25 dollar eBay gift card, and when I came home, I bought two things on eBay. I bought the fan that I needed for the laptop so that it could be cooled. I also bought a new CPU for the laptop. Interestingly, the laptop I'm using (Gateway NV57H48u) has a socket for a new CPU, the CPU isn't soldered on, which is very different compared to modern day laptops. It currently has t he i5-2430m, but I bought the i5-2450m. The only difference is that the i5-2450m runs .10 ghz faster, which really isn't much of a difference. However, yesterday, I stress tested it without the fan, and I forgot to shut it off when it got too hot, so the CPU died. Just to be sure that I still have a functioning laptop, I'm buying the new CPU just in case.

I also repasted my school laptop just for fun. I discovered it uses thermal pads instead of thermal paste. When I stress tested it, it worked fine. However, I'm not sure how much the improvement is, but when we get back to school, I'll compare with my other classmates' chromebooks.

Thanks for reading,
Issac