Howdy-Ho...!

Oy.  I just took a gander at the last time I blogged here.  Has it really been that long...?

Wow, talk about slacking.  Well, not entirely slacking.  During the time I've been absent, I've done the following:

1) Repaired a 40" Samsung flatscreen TV for a friend.  It wouldn't power on, and after some online research I discovered that the problem was due to some bad capacitors on the power board.  So we opened the TV up, I removed the power board, ordered and replaced the bad caps, and ta-daa:

 

Needless to say, my friend is happy and is indulging his BG habit once more.

2) Repaired my old 19" Samsung flatscreen monitor.  I opened it up - mostly out of curiosity after dealing with problem #1 above.  It was actually more difficult to take apart than the TV was.  But the problem was similar.  Turns out that Samsung monitors in general seem to have this problem, with bad caps on the power supply board.  Again, ordered replacements, soldered them in, am currently using that very monitor now as i type this blog entry.

3) Refurbished a Dell Inspiron 1501 laptop for one of my goddaughters.  It was having heat issues (a common problem for Dell laptops in general).  Cleaned out the fan, made some other fixes, sent it back just this Tuesday.

3) Refurbished a Compaq Desktop computer for a neighbor in my apartment building.  He ordered a Dell computer from one of those catalogs (Fingerhut or something like that), and they charged him an outrageous amount of money for a refurbished dinosaur.  I bought a much better unit from a friend, got it up and running with all the requisite headaches involved.

4) Refurbished a second Compaq computer for a friend who lives across town.  This one just needed a purge of the hard drive.  Seems to be okay now.

But hey, what the heck am I doing, going on like this????

This isn't an electronics repair blog.  It's a sketch blog. 

Seriously, though.  Now that all the tinkering is behind me, I'm eager to get back to the drawing tablet.  In particular, I've been trying to refine my skills with drawing the anatomy.  I've never been happy with my renderings of people.  They tend to leave a lot to be desired, but I think I'm finally beginning to make some headway at last.  Stay tuned for posts of recent sketches, plus a new Fantasy Genesis challenge.