Daily Archives: December 18, 2020

Business, Technology

Swapping Dell Notebook HD for SSD

Breathing new life into an old notebook.

I got this Dell G3 with an IPS full HD screen nearly two years ago, and despite its classification as a “gaming” machine with a dedicated video card with 4GB of VRAM, it always seemed sluggish.

I upgraded the stock 8GB of RAM to 16GB about a year ago, but that made little difference in boot time and app load time.

As I wrote the other day, the 1TB HD had been getting increasingly flaky, so I bought a 1TB SSD. Today I cloned the HD to the SSD, then opened up the machine and swapped the SSD for the HD.

Yowza. It seems to be booting up and loading programs in about half the time now.

Happy boy, eh?

dell g3 notebook ssd

Nature, Photography, Streamkeeping

Another Wet, Cold Fraser Foreshore Walk

Despite the wet, gloomy weather, I walked the lower portion of Byrne Creek in Burnaby, mostly because I was curious to see how high the river and creek were with the highest tide of the month and the rain.

Byrne Creek high tide
This is a few meters upstream of the flap gates at the  mouth of the creek

red-tailed hawk fraser foreshore burnaby bc
Red-tailed Hawk

gadwall fraser foreshore park burnaby bc
A couple of Gadwalls in the pond just west of the creek outfall

spotted towhee fraser foreshore park burnaby bc
Spotted Towhee

golden-crowned sparrow fraser foreshore park burnaby bc
Golden-crowned Sparrow