DSX86 News - My summer vacation ends

Sadly, today marks the last day of my summer vacation. The four weeks went by pretty fast again. During this week I have not worked much on DSx86 or DS2x86. I had planned some other things I wanted to do during my summer vacation, and of course I had not gotten around to those before it suddenly was the last vacation week and I really had to do them!
One interesting task I did was to replace the CMOS battery of my old Acer Travelmate 803 laptop. It had started to behave erratically with the system time, so I assumed that the CMOS battery was dead. Strangely the clock had not completely stopped working, instead after I set it to the correct time, it kept time for a little while (for a few hours), then suddenly jumped a couple of hours backwards and then stopped running.
I had purchased the laptop in May 2003, so it is over 9 years old. It just has been working so well that I have not had a need to replace it with a more modern machine. I have replaced the hard disk with a 32GB SSD disk, and I have also upgraded the RAM to 1.5GB, so the machine is reasonably fast (and what is more important to me, it is dead silent when running in Max Battery mode, regardless of CPU usage).
Anyways, I had found a blog post describing some important information about the CMOS battery, like the type (CR1220) and location (underneath the motherboard!) of it. Replacing it meant pretty much disassembling the whole thing, changing the battery, and then trying to put everything back together again. Surprisingly, no screws or other parts were left over after I had done this, and the machine even seems to work (and the clock keeps correct time)!
I was also given a heads up that NeoTeam is holding a Neo Coding Compo 2012, and it looks like also existing projects (like DSx86) are allowed to participate. Thus, I am thinking about possibly taking part in that competition. I would need to add a splash screen to DSx86, and I also would like to do some enhancements to it (I don't think the point of the competition is to simply add a splash screen and be done with it). I have not yet decided whether to take part, but I might.
Anyways, from now on I don't have all that much time to work on DSx86-related stuff, but I still try to continue working on the Windows 3.11 support for DS2x86. It would be fun to get that working, even though at the moment it seems very difficult and frustrating. But, the more difficult it is to achieve, the sweeter it feels when you finally get it working!
Thanks again for your interest in DSx86 (and for reading my blog!) :-)
http://dsx86.patrickaalto.com/DSblog.html