Summary: Speeding up Windows 7

To beef up the performance of my laptop, I changed the settings on Windows 7. The guides online are generally long-winded, so I made a summary of the things you can do.

Run:
1) services.msc Set some 10~ useless services from the default 'Automatic' to 'Manual'.
2) msconfig.exe Disable unwanted programs from starting on boot up.
3) powercfg.cpl Enable the 'High performance' power option.
4) sysdm.cpl Under 'Advanced', 'Performance', 'Settings'... disable all visual settings except the last 4.
5) mmsys.cpl Disable Windows sound effects by choosing the 'No Sound' theme.
6) appwiz.cpl Under 'Turn Windows features on/off', disable unwanted features.
7) control color Disable Windows Aero.
8) wuapp.exe Update Windows.
9) dfrgui.exe Defragment your hard disk.

Lastly, there are some batch commands to optimize your registry that you can download, go look for them.

Update: I've summarized the useful registry changes from known tweaks. To be honest, only a few make a perceivable difference to how fast your W7 performs, so I only specified those below. Anyway, copy the code in a .txt document, and rename it to anything with a .reg extension, and run it.

Imagine if library fines were in geometric progression...

I'd be broke. I always incur library fines. And before I get into the story, I think I've found the reason.

By the way, here's the extracted electron gun from the TV.

Anodizing titanium: Should I use diet or regular coke? (extended FAQ)

Here's the FAQ continuation from my original tutorial that I promised... Firstly, for those of you who haven't read my 22 Jan post here, I really, really, recommend you to google "DIY anodizing"! There are better guides out there, by people who do this for a living! Also, cheers to Rudan at happymtb.org, I really liked what you did there! 

Q: How much current should I use? / What electrical source can I use?
0.03A per square inch, or 0.0046A per square cm of exposed surface area. 9V battery cells will work. The electrical source I used was an AC-DC rectifier - you can get one from a hardware store, but it's a costly expense if you're only using it to experiment with anodizing. 2wheels explained here how you can put them together, and use 1.5V cells for lower step-ups; and that you can tear apart 9V cells for the same effect:

Hacking a 9V cell.

The effect of current is to speed up the process, i.e. increase the rate of evolution of oxygen at the anode. Practically, it's been found that it isn't necessary to increase the current.

Q: The color doesn't look good / the results are inconsistent. How do I improve the technique?
Using coke is a last resort. TSP and battery acid are better. You probably live in a country where these can be bought. I worked out that battery acid should come in 4.2M concentration - and you can use a 1:1 volume of distilled water to acid. If you have the acid in other concentrations, you should "Google for advice".

And this is a trick I came up with on my own: you can heat up the coke in the microwave oven. As I had explained in that post, the electrolysis of water is an endothermic process. By Le-Chatelier's principle, the forward reaction is favored under higher temperature conditions such as to counteract the stress by suppressing the extra heat. So you're speeding up the release of oxygen, without increasing the current. Simple trick isn't it?

The smell of boiled coke is kinda nauseating.

My sister told me, "Ew, that's sick." I agreed.
Anyway, note how much faster it's bubbling.

Anodizing titanium: Should I use diet or regular coke?

Updates: Extra info and accolades for this tutorial at starbike, here ;)

Left: anodized, right: unanodized. Done with a budget of $6.

As planned, I started to anodize some objects today. As you might know, my country bans practically everything. It's not like anyone knows that you can make explosives with sulphuric acid (battery acid) or ammonium nitrate (fertilizer), or that you can make poisons with sodium borate (laundry bleach).

I called up most hardware/paint shops (about 20) in my vicinity before I gave up finding sodium phosphate, which I thought of using as a substitute. They didn't really understand what was "trisodium phosphate" or a "degreaser", so I couldn't possibly tell them I was looking for "sodium phosphate" to "anodize" titanium. So I simply claimed that I needed a powder form cleaner to wash my walls before painting them.

They'd first tell me that they didn't have stock of what I wanted (which was what I was interested in) - then start on a long story to dissuade me from buying a cleaner, and teach me all sorts of techniques to paint my walls! And I actually got very sound advice! Use an anti-fungal chemical, rent a water jet, blast off the paint, wait a few days to dry, apply a lacquer/primer, apply paint.

Anyway, as I called up more and more shops, I learned more techniques along the way, and started to come up with more credible stories for how I was planning to paint my walls, lol. I swear, I'm an expert at painting walls now. But unfortunately, no one had TSP i.e. sodium phosphate.

Back to the story. I gave up using anything fanciful, and decided to electrolyze phosphoric acid instead. Where could I get a plentiful supply of that?

Should I use regular, diet, or zero coke?

Finally back...

Tritium markers =P Which colour looks better?

Well, after a real fright with my applications where my latest backups of most of files vanished along with my hosting account and even worse, thanks to my dead RAID array or rather my dead motherboard, I'm finally back in business. I can't believe it. I made 4 backups with decreasing priority, and the 2 backups with the top priority just died on me at the same time. How unlucky can I be? I'll start updating on everything very soon.

Anyway, let me know on MSN which colour looks best. I'm rigging my really old Nokia 3310 (the one I'm bringing into the army) as you may know, and a tritium marker makes it imposingly nice in the dark. The tritium gas in the vial emits beta particles which in turn cause the phosphor inside to glow. Personally I think blue looks the best, also because it's the brightest (probably since there are comparable intensities from the phosphors - proportional to the decay constant of the tritium, hence the blue glow looks the brightest given its shortest wavelength).

m4nifold project: more processors coming...

I collected a good number of processors.
- 2 generic looking AMD processors from 1999
- 1 AMD 64 processor
- 1 AMD 64 x2 dual core processor
- 2 Pentium 4 1.6GHz processors

6 processor units

Some of the pins are bent and need to be reshaped

MSI K8N motherboard (nForce 3/socket 939 chipset) for AMD 64 processor

VGA 64MB graphics processing unit

Vacuum gauge controller repair: ALMOST DONE!

Now, in case you're wondering where I went lately... my motherboard died =(

Which means my onboard RAID controller died.
Which means my data etc. etc. went along with it.

Sadly, it's an nVidia n680i chipset... (notice SLi bridge in the pic) which is really to find a replacement for. Can't find another SLi/socket 775 motherboard, so I decided to do away with the SLi configuration to save costs. But what I really miss is the sound card (also in pic). I lost like... 3 weeks of essays and 24~ hours of installation/update time for 200GB of stuff. Then someone bought our home and I had to accompany my mum to find a new house, all of which weren't as nice as my current home, since they cost less. Strange case of motherboard analogy...

Huh? Anyway... uhh... so, yay!

(It was really fun to watch motherboard troubleshooting. I'm not that good to figure it out myself. I did tell the guy at the start I suspected that the motherboard was dead although the LEDs lit up, but I don't have the skills to demonstrably prove that it's not the processor or part of the power supply. It's a long process too.)

Okay, let's move on. I have 4 updates: on the vacuum gauge controller, my bicycle, the supercomputer, and the filament source. I'll start with the vacuum gauge controller, and maybe write about the other 3 later.

There were loose connections on the power board which caused the leakage to earth. Although it was easy to identify that it was the power module, there was still a painful process of testing every component on it. We needed to secure these connections first.

In this state, no one was going to be able to put it back together if Fernando met with any mishap. Fernando pried everything apart for testing. Then he was the only one who could remember where each part went.

It was not easy to replace the broken relay switch... but we didn't like the replacement either. It could have been causing problems. So we replaced the same part a second time.

The red/black cables lead to another, new relay switch.
(See previous: here, and here.)

Then Fernando's dad couldn't take it anymore and just had to barge in with his insulation tester and we finally found the last source of earth leakage!

Fernando explained his dad's zeal, "This type of stuff turns him on."

So... we found it. Surely, this had to be it. We exhausted almost single component.

Last root of the problem!

Frankly, I'm not too sure how this works. It seems like a very old surge protector design. In the case of a surge, the pair of ceramic disc capacitors (red) are overloaded and blown (well, I don't mean 'blown' literally... it looks dramatic here because we broke the pins with our hands for fun since this component is of no use anymore). This opens the circuit; and 'shorts' the current to the earth wire (green).

Made by General Electric.

We salvaged an old PC power supply for the same component... then replaced the original one (with the 2 disc capacitors) with it (now it's a single capacitor - the white rectangular block with wordings on it)

Replaced component (see immediately to the right of the high voltage label).

Then it was the moment of truth. I pulled out a power cord from one of the old CPUs on my supercomputer project; plugged it in; switched off the TV etc. just in case the circuit breaker tripped; and flicked on the switch.

And I heard an awesome humming sound. I never heard a transformer make so much noise before (you don't hear your laptop chargers making this noise). But at high voltage, or basically any factor which increases chance of overheating (in this case, we also subjected the transformer rated at 60 Hz to a 50 Hz AC supply, which is OK but not advisable in the long run as it shortens its lifespan from overheating), it makes this sound. The effect is called magnetostriction.

(By the way, Fernando is talking to me in the background.)

After which, I played with the buttons. I have no idea what do "EM" and "Degas" mean. It's amazing how we've managed to fix this without knowing what it does. I mean surely, these buttons have something to do with an electromagnetic field and the degassing phase of the vacuum chamber, but what exactly do the buttons do? And it switches back to "OFF" seconds after I press the "ON" button. I hope this is only because we don't have any gauges connected to the controller, so it smartly switches off on its own.

Each lit LED indicates that a certain component is functional.

Amusingly, we don't have the instructions manual because it costs a lot(again, I've no idea how we've managed to fix this), so the LEDs don't do much besides look cool.

Another (clearer) view of the LEDs.

Now, what's left of the vacuum gauge controller is for us to

1. Design a fan cooling system for the power board and the transformer. There's a set of diodes which get really hot; and the transformer does heat up pretty badly at high voltage.

2. Buy some new lighting for the switches. If you observe carefully, the light for the "ON" butotn is clearly dimmer than the light for the "POWER" button.

General updates

m4nifold project

I traded the 2 8-ohm bass and 2 8-ohm treble speakers from salvaging my TV for 4 processors, 1 motherboard, and some sticks of RAM. Very good there.

Life

Many things happened the past week. Gave tuition to an engineering student... their math is really different from the syllabus I've learnt. Found out how to build radar dishes; and had a laugh from "Teach me Laplace," as YS put it. I should give tuition for money, maybe. I'm starting to think that I'm pretty good at it. I came up with example questions impromptu; and the questions are actually very challenging but meaningful according to my tutee. I think I might really enjoy being a professor.

We also discussed something funny about relationships.

"If you're stuck in the friend zone, you're never going to get out of it. It's like... AN INFINITE SQUARE WELL."

Had an important interview... think I did badly. Had a very eventful paper. Long stories. Maybe I'll write about these when I'm free. I think it's about time to dedicate to my research and QFT again.

Remembering the November heat

Overpriced bicycle parts
Me: "3g seat clamp for 99 euros? That's like... 33000 euros per kg!"
Eric: "Bernhard is smart to go into the carbon business. No one else can make..."

[A few days later.]

Eric (quoting): "He only has a 30.0mm size. But 60 euros: 'i have seat clamb with 30,0mm in stock that will work price is 60 €'"
Me: "Why is it more expensive now? Tell him 'Don't € around with me... I will € him!'"

[A day later.]

Me: "I can use the university workshop to make lots of things..."
Eric: "Good, next time I send things to you and you make for me."
Me: "Sure, no problem. But I will charge money..."
Eric: "Wtf?"

Me: "Don't worry, my pricing scheme is very easy to understand. Frame, seatpost, whatever... doesn't matter what it is - 33000 euros per kg."


For dummies
Me: "They should write a book to add on to the 'for Dummies' series."
Shun: "On?"
Me: "Quantum Field Theory for Dummies"
Shun: "...not many people would read."

[A few minutes later...]

Me (quoting a source): "'I think it would be a good idea to spec up also on advanced integration techniques, including distributions and functionals.' You see? That's more like what I'm talking about! IT WOULD BE A GOOD IDEA TO SPEC UP ON ADVANCED INTEGRATION TECHNIQUES. SOUNDS MORE LIKE A RPG NOW."

m4nifold supercomputer cluster: Node 1

I started troubleshooting my P4 2.8GHz PC and it, like everything else, is giving me trouble.

Haven't seen the inside for 5 years. I didn't know it had a red PCB... D: pretty

I am/was very sure that it was the HDD problem. There are 2 HDDs, a Seagate 80GB (primary master) and Maxtor 40GB (secondary master). With both on, it shows a blank screen exactly when I'm supposed to reach the Windows boot screen. Removing the primary master, it gets past that and shows that Windows is corrupted - as in, I must have left broken installation of it on the backup HDD. No problem, I put in the Windows installation disc, and realized that the CD-RW is practically dead. After lots of tries, it finally started reading... set the boot priority the CD-RW, and I installed Windows on the 40GB drive... starts up fine.

The Seagate 80GB HDD that has been giving me the problem initially.

Not all is lost when you can remove 1 of 2 HDDs!

After an update, it starts to BSOD on me every time I am supposed to reach the Windows boot screen. Eventually, the BIOS settings etc. don't even show up when I power up the PC. I'm convinced that there's a hardware problem with my 40GB HDD as well, with a possibility that the motherboard died on me, or both.

All is lost when you can't even access your BIOS settings. ;_;

Gives and takes

A somewhat Antarctic story ahead...

Heater coil wire, at last. ^^

I broke 2 cutting discs like this, and they flew at inestimable velocities while I was cutting the part. I'm quite glad I bought 0 degree glasses despite my perfect eyesight - they came to use as safety goggles today. (I decided to put on some eye protection for once since the plastic bits caused much worry.)

Well, I managed to find some unexpected things, and at the same time, I didn't manage to find most of the things I expected to find. On hindsight though, today was a huge learning experience for me. If I list the things, I earned.

Could not find:
1. Battery acid
2. Aluminium wire
3. Nitrile-based rubber gloves

Found:
4. Nichrome wire
5. 300 series dremel at darn cheap price
6. Sandpaper at a quarter of the price I used to pay for it

Anodizing aluminium and titanium

I mentioned some plans to anodize titanium parts on my own. After today's paper, I rushed some readings and I worked out the setup needed for anodizing aluminium and titanium. And I more or less know the required voltages, current and acid concentrations. Now I just need to buy some 12 gauge aluminium wire, battery acid and anodizing dye (for aluminium). I have to shop for a good rotary tool for my Ergolever tuning project, anyway. I guess I'll be reduced to bread and water for this month... D:

Anyway, I planned to write a more complete tutorial, but my time's limited for today. Maybe I'll leave it for next time when I've actually carried it out. Until then, I'll just provide the scan of my rough working:

Evidently, I'm not good at neat drafts.

The interesting principle of research is always to come up with better ideas than before. Applying that, I wonder if there's an easier way to anodize titanium to the gold part of the color spectrum without applying high voltages.

m4nifold supercomputer cluster: First checklist of parts

I'm lazy to compose a completely new post, so I'll just lift this from the IHIQS forums as I've written it. Now the next part is to cut the costs to a stage where I can afford the thing, and find donor nodes/parts.

"OK guys, I've worked on this for some time and I'm planning to set up a completely new rig with 4 nodes on top of the pool of unwanted PCs to boost the cluster's performance.

I wrote a spreadsheet of SSE2 benchmarks against cost, and based on MFLOPS/cost, I found the present most cost-effective processors to be the Athlon II X3-425, and very closely, the Athlon II X4-620. On comparing the power consumption, I think that the Athlon II X4-620 will make an excellent basis for this project. Going for micro-ATX for small form factor, we have

- Athlon II X4-620, 4 = S$600 (S$150)
- Biostar TA785G3 (micro-ATX compliant/AM3 socket/2.6GHz HT/DDR3 compliant), 4 = S$392 (S$98)
- Logisys micro-ATX 350W power supply, 4 = S$84 (S$21)
- Intel gigabit/PCI-e network adapter, 4 = S$168 (S$42)
- Team Group Xtreem DDR3-1333/2GB/CL9, 8 = S$560 (S$70)
- Samsung DVD-RW x22, 1 = S$34
- Western Digital Raptor 74GB/SATA2/10k RPM, 2, RAID0 = $0 (already in possession)

The only thing that bothers me is that Amdahl's 2nd law suggests that I have a memory bottle neck here, of roughly factor 2. But the same goes to the I/O bandwidth, which can't seem to be improved any further, so it should be OK.

Now... that sets my budget at S$1838 = US$1327.75. Which is still really low. I'm roughly expecting it to perform as fast as a hardcore gaming system based on two Core i7 970 processors at the moment - at a fraction of the cost, excluding the additional nodes. Making a lower-bound/upper-bound estimation, the system will come round to 65.47GFLOPS to 86.62GFLOPS.

Now, the thing is, how should I cut cost? I'm thinking there should be some 2nd hand goods out there... I'll scour eBay. If anyone has an unwanted DVD-RW to give, please let me know. ^^"

Supercomputer project: COTS processor comparison

I spent some time tabulating all of the data. I initially planned to take an average of the benchmarks to find the best performing processor for value but without normalising the values, the parameters are just too far apart to take an arithmetic mean.

The Athlon X4-620 just owns in every category.

A few points I've noticed... Intel's pricing strategy makes sense in that you're paying an increasing premium for the highest end processors, whereas AMD's pricing strategy seems fairly linear - pay more, get more.

The best processor to use for a supercomputer project based on COTS nodes at the moment seems to be the Athlon X4-620. What's not pointed out in the list is that power consumption and operating temperatures also very important for a supercomputer project. And based on the reviews I could find, the X4-620 performs very well in terms of power consumption and operating temperature when loaded. My Q6600 2.4ghz/core heats up to 80 deg C when running 2 MATLAB PDE simulations at the same time, while the X4-620 2.6ghz/core only heats up to 42 deg C when fully loaded! What a massive difference, even if you take it that my CPU has poor fan management.

Next on the shopping list: micro-ATX motherboards, memory, power supplies. The rest of the costs are actually negligible. However, a point to note, it seems like a 4-node system will cost around US$1.5k at this stage, with S$600 to be poured into processors alone. Running at the present supercomputing minimum standard of 2GB memory/core => 32GB memory (see: http://www.beowulf.org/archive/2008-July/022327.html for great discussions), then we'll need 16 sticks of 2GB ram which will cost a staggering S$1216 at the moment. Maybe some compromise has to be done... at 3GB/S$99, Team Elite's memory is actually the best priced. What about 1.5GB/core... 8 sticks of 3GB = S$792. Sounds like the best deal.

Lastly, I think I will center the cluster around these 4 main nodes... so I thought of a project title... m4nifold... something. Lol.

Credits for benchmarks: guru3d.com, cpu-world.com, Bell Systems Electronics.

Supercomputer project (prologue)

It looks like Nathan was interested in building a Beowulf cluster from a long time ago, too. I'm looking forward to a possible collaboration for IHIQS. Meanwhile, I've been contributing to microfluidics on BOINC... http://www.ufluids.net/team_members.php?teamid=78&offset=0&sort_by=expavg_credit

Everyone's doing folding@home, but I find microfluidics really cool, having done a project on fluid dynamics myself. There're many unexplored applications - microbubbling, for instance, as my previous research touched on, is difficult to predict but can be used for effective and environmentally friendly cleaning techniques. Ultrasound cleaning (if you've washed your spectacles at an optician's) relies on this too. The Japanese are ahead in this area of research, apparently (you get a lot of these in the Japanese Journal of Applied Physics)... very neat. Same as how I thought I had a novel idea, only to discover last night that RF lab has been developing it: Sayaka capsule. I was thinking of using copper resonance for the energy transfer though - oscillating a magnetic field over the abdomen seems like a troublesome thing.

I need to see what I can do to reuse my 2.8ghz P4. It's still in good condition.

And maybe I should focus one of my projects rather than all of them at the same time... my curiosity prods me at too many directions and too many things at the same time ;_;

Supercomputer project

I found some inspiration for what to do with my Raptors if they were to be warrantied (recall story here). The title of this post is self-explanatory. I've always wanted to try a Linux operating system and writing kernel for it, so this seems like a good way to start. I should be able to afford a Beowulf cluster. And I'll pair it with my particle accelerator for good humour.

Salvaging a TV (part 2)

How do you pick up a screw that dropped into a deep, narrow hole?

Continuing from where I left off the last time, I unfastened the vacuum tube of the TV (really, really heavy), then carefully lowered it onto the floor flat on its face. Then, I encountered a problem... I can't hoist it back up, but an important screw fell in there, too narrow and deep for my fingers to reach.

1. Chopsticks

I'm not sure about you, but the most intuitive thing is to start digging with a tool, then try 'pincering' it with a pair of tools (screwdrivers) - which quickly became obvious to me that it was as easy as a winning a soft toy from an arcade claw machine.

2. Variations of the Handkerchief on Extraction of a Cork

I'd have preferred this method over the 3rd (which I eventually used) because it's faster if I had thread or a handkerchief around me. I'm not sure where I learned this one from, but it's very similar to the way Nathan tried(?) to extract a cork from a bottle on BBC's Battle of the Brains. Prod a rag under the screw, and up to a reachable height, and pull it out.

(Oh, I could actually have taken off my shirt and used it as a rag.)

Alternatively, what I'd usually do is tie to a clove hitch near the tip of a screwdriver, tie a loose thumb knot near the hitch with a long trailing thread end, and guide the screw into the thumb knot. Tighten, and extract.

3. Magnet

I prodded the screw to the side of the casing, then tried to pull it up along the wall using a fridge magnet. But the magnetic field wasn't strong enough. So I needed a magnet that was long enough to reach inside the deep hole.

My screwdrivers are made of mild steel, so I stroked one of them with the fridge magnet to rearrange the magnetic dipoles (induce a magnetic moment), and it soon produced a field that was strong enough to pick up the screw.

Then, I cheerily placed my fridge magnet back where it came from, only to realize (to my surprise) that my magnet looks different now!

Unlike you all, I've visited Zerland before.

My hand was wet with a methylated solvent (I use it to degrease/clean my hands or any surfaces, and it's very useful for removing the adhesive residue of plastic labels/bar code stickers on my pens.). So I was responsible for defacing it. I always forget this one! :(

Disconnecting all of the ports was a slow and careful process. I realized that I didn't need to colour code/number tag the matching ports, because Panasonic already had indices printed in ink on each port. Some of them had faded a little, but can be easily interpreted. After a while of getting used to it, I became more hasty. But the wires were still in a mess. I exercised some weightweenism in disposing as much useless material as I could, and accumulated a bag full of plastic, screws etc.

I should look for my misplaced camera.

The last speaker (or "electroacoustic transducer", but I'll be accused of pedantry). Removed from under the vacuum tube.

Power board.

Not entirely sure what this board does, but it seems to be a power board as well. There are a lot of heat sinks here; and 2 very big capacitors in the foreground.

All of the power goes through here.

High-voltage board.

This should be the audio amplification, visual processing etc. board. Again, I can't really tell at first glance.

The connector ports at the bottom took me a while to disconnect. After 10 years (and more) on its own, the press fits became tight. I became a pro at disconnecting these using the flat-edge screwdriver as lever.

Close-up on one of the heat sinks.

Close-up on the connector ports.

Connector ports between the controls module and the power board.

Another part of the controls module.

Salvaging a TV: Building a miniature particle accelerator (part 1)

I've (not) been watching television from a CRT screen up until 2009. Hey, at its time, 29" was THE thing OK. Then one fine day a decade later, it started to 'cast shadows', and a while later, it no longer showed any images.

One heavy bugger to carry.

It wasn't that difficult to find the part responsible for the damage. With some lighting examination, I easily found the electrical component that burned out. Without a multimeter, my first judgment tells me that the damage is pretty localized - definitely repairable. It has a standardized rating imprinted, so I can easily find a replacement and solder it on if I wanted to repair the TV.

Culprit: An overheated capacitor.

A closer look at the high voltage circuit board. (Above: burn mark; below: HV warning)

But you see, the topic of this post is Salvaging a TV, not Repairing a TV. So I'll repair the high voltage board, THEN salvage the electron gun! Television sets are relatively affordable nowadays anyway, and repairing this set wouldn't yield any monetary profit. And it is definitely more difficult to find huge CRT screens with powerful electron guns nowadays than it is to find big LCD or plasma screens. The obvious thing that occurred to me was to salvage the thing for future use.

A particle accelerator, videlicet electron gun. Now we're talking business.

Warning for X-ray radiation and implosion of vacuum tube on the radiation shield. Confirms what I needed to know.

The pictures that follow basically tell one story: essentially every part is made in Japan.

Electron gun, made in Japan.

To be honest, I can't explain this phenomenon. The graphite(?) coating seemed to have become some sort of sticky paste after prolonged irradiation.

Firstly, I had to dispose as much of the system mass as possible, because of the limited space in my apartment. Fortunately, I am good at removing redundant weight, you see. Besides removing the back casing, I could detach the speakers. Promptly disconnected the speakers, then unscrewed their plastic casings. Took the casings apart, and isolated the sound systems.

Port for side-mounted speaker.

Original location of the right speaker. Notice the handmade detail: windings of insulation tape and masking tape are all they're using to keep the wirings neat. The tapes are effective - outlasted the function of the TV, definitely.

The Phillips head screwdriver was all I needed - I have a smaller one for trickier angles, but I prefer the large one because it gets the work done fast (I don't have a very good physical explanation though). I realized that I needed the slotted head screwdriver as a secondary weapon to cut open and pry apart the PTFE seals that held the casings together (alongside with 2 small machine screws). I guess they needed to keep contaminant particles away from the sound systems. Good idea; not written on standard Physics textbooks in the electromagnetism/electromagnetic induction chapters, certainly.

PTFE seals, pried open.

Everything taken apart.

Again, a decade ago, it was all made in Japan...

Made in Japan.

Made in Japan.

Made in Japan (except for the Mag Instruments torchlight).

Made in JPN.

Made in JPN.

Well, I don't have time for analysis of the fanciful details on the sound systems. The bulk of the weight comes from the radiation shield and vacuum tube behind the screen. I didn't remove it yet, seeing that it was a dangerous job and I didn't want to risk the thing breaking (apart from safety issues). I have to slowly hoist the TV down onto its screen surface, then unscrew the shield and vacuum tube from the main casing.

I also have to analyze how the electron gun works, because I can't put the TV down on its front side unless I disconnected the rest of the circuit boards from the electron gun - a hassle to work out afterwards if I didn't remember how they were arranged. I could only recognize the electric and magnetic field (copper coil) components.

So, I'll probably take apart the rest of the TV some time this week, when something depressing has happened to me, and thereby I would have a greater disregard for my life. After which I estimate that I need another 2 days of work to finish up isolating the electron gun, buying a new capacitor, and getting it to work (safely). So, 3 more continuations to this topic should follow (supposing I don't die anywhere inbetween these 3 installments).