Start: 10:00

• For whatever reason I had a very hard time figuring out which connector was a hard drive power connector.  It is molex 8981.
• The footprint for this connector is not under molex but instead under Thomas Betts in pad to pad which is part of the reason I was confused.
• Decided to use a single connector per component.  This will make routing the traces more straight foward and may fix the problem I had when I tried before, without adding additional trace layers.

End: 6:00

1:00-4:00(OVERHEAD IT):  Phil’s laptop has been having an intermittent problem where it randomly freezes.  I also noticed that it was pretty slow.

• I first checked the heat sinks as the laptop is kinda old and intermittent problems can be caused by overheating due to dust.
• The heat sinks turned out to be cleaner than expected.  Its kinda funny how my computer has a dust filter and somehow had way more dust in it.
• When I started it back up I noticed the hard drive was running at full speed constantly and seemed to be the bottleneck in the performance.  The main issue seemed to be that windows updates were behind but it was still odd that this would take so many resources when it was only downloading the updates.
• I did some various other things like checking for malware, cleaning/defraging the registry, and a few other general maintenance procedures.
• Once the updates and other maintenance was done, the computer seemed to run much better than initially.  There is something strange where the programs that start with windows are using about 3 times as many handles as my computer which also runs vista.  This may be causing some of the excess hard drive use but I am not sure.
• As the problem was intermittent its hard to say if it was fixed but it does seem faster, so  we’ll see.  If it happens again either windows needs to be reinstalled or the hard drive should be replaced.  I definitely recommend backing up all that isn’t already, as hard drive crashes do cause computers to lock up, and might be a sign its going soon.