A blog about coffee roasting...

That's what this is supposed to be. Somehow I drift off into a little bit of everything. But coffee roasting is a way of life these days. So if something goes kaput in that endeavor it's a big deal. And that's what happened.

In about 2022 my trusty Samsung laptop succumbed to what was probably a virus which affected the display processor. I'd been using it daily for 5 or 6 years. As laptops go it seemed indestructible. Wrong. Again! 

 

Dead laptops. Lots of them! No they're not all mine... a couple more than the pile on the right.

I replaced the Samsung with a Lenovo which had an ARM (brand) microprocessor (vs. Intel); that lasted less than 6 months (!). The issue seemed to be construction quality of the Lenovo laptop- it became intermittent and kept rebooting after the screen suddenly went blank for a moment. If I couldn't trust it, it had to go.

That led to an HP Probook. That laptop was a real work horse. Sadly work horses get viruses just like a no-name piece of junk. And that was with what I thought was decent anti-virus software from McAfee. But the virus-creators are always a little ahead of the virus-defeaters.

So now I have a Dell. Again. I went down this road a couple decades ago. With a half-life about equal to the snap of a mouse trap I went for cheap. $500 on Amazon,com with 1 TB SSD, 16 GB of RAM (16 GB RAM was a mistake; really limits response time) and an Intel i5 processor of some flavor. It'll have to do.

So I loaded everything I needed to get started roasting only to find the roaster s/w (which I've used for years through 3 generations) had a bug that only shows up on a new install (*&^%*#$%!!). Not all bad news since I'm a beta tester for RoasTime software for the Aillio Bullet roaster. It took a week but I finally got RoasTime 4 installed and working properly. The issue is there are 2 instances of the serial port and there should be only one. So it confirmed a bug and I can only hope someone is out killing it. But in the meantime I have 4 pounds of coffee to show for my effort!

And yes, it tastes great!

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