July 2008 Archives

Anyone who owns a T-Rex 450 or 500 knows that one of the big downers is the short flights and long charge times.  I have a Thunder Power 610c charger which is capable of charging a 6 cell pack, however I only have 3 cell packs for my T-Rex 450.  I read a forum post somewhere where someone built a parallel balancer lead which let him charge 2 3s1p packs at the same time.  He had the right idea but the problem with charging them parallel like that is that the balancer can't see the true voltage of any one cell.  It can only see the combined average voltage of the 2 that are paralleled.  The only way to safely charge and balance 2 3s1p packs is to build a serial balance lead that combines the two packs into a proper 6s1p.  The charger can then see each individual cell and will charge up to 25.2v, balancing the cells to 4.2v each.

After having run Windows Vista (Business 64) for over a month now, I can say that with a few tweaks, I believe it is ready for full-time use.  I'm a full time consultant so I work off of a laptop in the field running a full suite of software about 10 hours per day.  This means that if my OS is misbehaving, I'm in big trouble because if I can't work, I can't bill my hours and if I can't bill my hours, I'm getting a serious call from the guys above. 

Despite all of the dogging of Vista from XP and 2000 users, I've found that I'm faster in my day-to-day activities than I was in Windows XP.  Here's my list of Vista must-knows: