Upgrades for a long time friend?

Not so much. I managed to procure to a fairly cheap Athlon TF-20 a few days ago. I can now say with confidence that I give up on making this LT3103u any more powerful. My unlucky clock generator chipset has plagued in my quest to overclock and even in my quest to reduce power consumption through underclocking. And now it has returned to haunt me in this latest cpu endeavor.

I pried the little thing open carefully (quite easy, actually), and swapped the TF-20 in. Put things back together quickly and hit that power button. Nothing. No post. Pulled the ram out, no change. Swapped the L110 back in to make sure I didn't fry anything on the way in, and it fired right up and into Windows. Bummer eh. I was excited about this.

So to anyone looking for a cheap cpu upgrade, if you have the unoverclockable clock generator (the one that only gets to 1.43GHz and is unstable during clock changes) don't bother. Be happy at 1.43GHz I guess, it's still more powerful than an Atom :P

Consider them greased.

I caved under the pressure, again. Bought myself an eReader. I drove 45 miles to the nearest Borders store last weekend in the middle of the day and bought an Aluratek Libre. If $140 for me was nearing impulse buy price, then $100 for me was like buying a stick of gum.

I've read a few books on it so far and my overall impressions after a week can be summed up in the phrase "good but not great."

I compared it side by side to the Kobo they had in the store, and the eInk display is by far the better looking technology. I'm not calling the Libre's reflective LCD bad, but it can't shake a stick at the contrast eInk delivers in any lighting. That's my only real negative point. After all, I did decide on the Libre.

The positives flow on for paragraphs, so I'll save them for another long winded review post. With pictures. I haven't found any real in depth reviews online of the Aluratek Libre, so I'd like to get one up for the Google spiders to crawl across once or twice.

Until then, I'm off to find an AMD TF-20 for this Gateway. That'll be fun.