- Passenger side wiper kept popping out of the motor arm.
- Headlights started randomly cutting out at night for a second or two at a time (always exciting in the "I hope I don't die" sort of way).
- Starter was on it's way out - started working intermittently and often needed a whack to get it going.
Getting the wiper going again was fun. These things weren't designed to last 30 years. The motors never die - it's always wear that causes the arm to pop off of the wiper base. I'd already gone though 4 of them, and this was the last one.
Since you can't find them new anywhere, I ended up having to weld a washer to keep things in place. Surprisingly enough, it worked quite well.
Moving on to the headlights, spraying some contact cleaner in the switch just killed it altogether. I'll never understand why car manufacturers ever thought it was a good idea to run headlight current through the switch - do you really want all that current running through a small set of contact points until they inevitably burn out? Is the voltage drop really acceptable? Would a relay really add that much cost to the car?
Originally I was just going to clean the switch and wire in a relay. Since the switch just died completely though, I swapped another in. I'll wire a couple relays on another day to make sure the replacement switch lasts, and to remove as much voltage drop as possible.
For the starter, opening it up and giving it a quick visual inspection showed that the brushes were worn (which was in-line with the symptoms). I really considered buying a remanufactured one. A new brush set turned out to be only 8 dollars though. I couldn't justify buying a new one without at least trying to replace the brushes on my own first.
I guess there's a reason that a rebuilt starter costs a fair chunk of change - replacing those brushes can't be done with a soldering iron - it needed a torch which of course wanted to melt more than the solder. It's also a 2-person job if you're doing it on your own. It's done, and I'd do it again the next time, but only because it saves well over a hundred dollars.
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Computer stuff...
Kaspersky (mentioned last time), did eventually come through with a fix. Still not thrilled about the activation issues and the time it took though.
I decided to try installing Snow Leopard on my machine. The "new" way involves having a Retail Snow Leopard disc (which I have). This is fine - really, if people are running SL, Apple should be at least getting the money for it. The downside is that it's a royal pain to get everything going - bootloader packages have replaced distros, but it can be much more difficult to get everything installed and set up. I feel for the guy who buys Snow Leopard and then can't figure out how to install it.
With Snow Leopard up and running, I decided to see how PC games fare on the new versions of Parallels and Fusion and do a write-up about it. Parallels came out ahead this time around. I'd really love to see both VM's step it up a lot in the gaming area in the future - it would be nice not to have to dual-boot every time I get a few minutes to play a game.
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On the other side of things, purchase reviews for the EGRR site have been coming in rather steadily (I'll be having no issues meeting the 1-per-month quota I've set for myself). The videos seem to get very few views though - enough that they've gotta be helping a few people, but those few amount to less than 1% of the site's traffic. Seems like pictures and a write-up are enough for most people. That's fine, but a bit of a shame that I spent all that money on those video-editing programs. I'm sure I'll use them here and there (and will still do video reviews for EGRR), but at this point I'm just going to be creating simple videos - something that Windows Movie Maker or iMovie would certainly be fine for.
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