A quiet refurbishing day

Recently I’ve been catching up on my backlog of reviews and you could be forgiven for thinking that’s what I generally do. Far from it, today I’ve had a quiet day refurbishing. A couple of weeks ago, in order to do some testing before sending some kit off to Spain, I bought an Itead tiny router (and wrote about it).

I also bought a second-hand Draytek router from Ebay (the Vigor 2820). At first sight you’d think this not inexpensive (new) modem was worthless and beaten up but this morning, armed with little more than kitchen roll, some of my all-time favourite cleaner (Servisol Foam Cleanser 30) and a blade, I restored this venerable but perfectly functional ADSL2+ Security Firewall router (DSL, WAN2 and 4 Gigabit ports) back to “the showroom shine”. £25 (sterling) second-hand – can’t complain. Seriously, the Draytek looks like brand, spanking new. Not the WiFi model but I didn’t need WiFi in this case. I have been a fan of Draytek modems for many years.

Then I started on an old Lenovo all-in-one PC that my friend Aidan had pulled out of one of their offices during an upgrading session. Firstly I used my Servisol spray on the PC and it’s keyboard (which initially LOOKED absolutely awful) – then took it apart for an internal clean-up. It turns out that it had already had a series of upgrades so this (old) all-in-one PC is in fact running an AMD 20Ghz chip with 10GB RAM and a 1TB hard drive – not to be sneezed at. Once I replaced a fairly lacklustre Ubuntu with Windows 10, now it looks and works A TREAT. Seriously you would never think it had ever been used. It works perfectly.

Good use of a cold winter morning I’d say.