DIY Laptop repair

The tricky part of laptops is that they are made of a collection of mainly non standard parts, and the impossibly thin enclosure its made in and that they are seem difficult to service and repair yourself.  I am going to try and dispell some of the myths of laptop repair and maintenance and offer some insight on how to do repairs yourself.  “I took my laptop to be repaired and they said its going to cost £XYZ for the part and £ABC per hour someone to repair it!! – its cheaper to buy a new one!!” You probably heard these words from someone at some point.

However you may be able to do some troubleshooting and maybe replace parts yourself. If you have been told its not worth fixing it yourself and its out of warranty and it might otherwise get chucked in the bin you might as well have a go yourself, the worse you can do is make it even more broken… Lets try and work out what the cause of the problem of a typical laptop without an accidental damage that will not boot or perhaps crashes randomly.

1. Does your operating system (in this case Windows) boot to the desktop?

If it doesn’t, try tapping F8 key repeatedly and select safe mode or last good known configuration. If you can get in this way, you might be able to reboot afterwards and start it up in the normal way. If not, you might want to do a reinstall of your operating system and see if you can rule out a software problem, of course all data on the C: drive will be lost.

2. Check the event log.

In Windows XP go to start, control panel, administrator tools and check the event logs.

Red crosses indicates an error or crash that happened recently. The error message might not be something useful, but you can always put it through google and it might tell you a bit about the issue in better detail. This technique worked successfully on a Sony Vaio laptop I had at the NHS, which had a physical problem causing it to crash randomly, this turned out to be a faulty wireless card which was revealed after googling that error code.  Keeping the wireless turned off didn’t help this. As the wireless feature was not needed by the owner for her work, I ended up removing a discarding the card and put insulation tape of the aerial cables, result the laptop worked fine afterwards, I had a similar experience with two of my Compaq Evo N800 laptops as the cards on these are prone to failure also, I have both of them working with different cards now. The Sony laptop would have been otherwise scrapped and wasted public money to get a new one and labour to get a replacement prepared for the owner.

3. Check memory

My preferred way to do this is to use a similar diagnostic utility called Memtest86 I learned from my Novatech days. Goto http://www.memtest.org and download the program in .ISO format as this is a complete CD image that you can boot from and should do a thorough test of your machine, this should be obvious within a few minutes as it will show some red messages.

4. Hard disk test.

Hard disks fail more often on laptops, as they can damaged by shock or being bumped. All hard disk manufacturers provide diagnostic software free of charge as a boot CD, this should be downloadable in ISO format from the makers site, ie: Seagate, Western Digital, Hitachi etc. If the disk has failed, this is usually mounted in a small slide out module which can easily be replaced yourself.

5. Remove other items to get a better diagnosis

– Remove the battery (I have seen some batteries cause a short which cause the laptop not to boot)
– As well, try on battery power and not power supply, I have seen people use the wrong power supply which doesnt feed enough watts to the unit.
– Remove any attached peripherals (my desktop PC wont boot if a camera SD card or my iPod is attached)
– If the CD drive is a swappable unit, remove it, there maybe a simple lever to remove it.
– Remove one of the sticks of memory, this might be in a trapdoor underneath, or under the keyboard or palm rest.

Give this a try folks, if you want some extra help please feel free to comment if you like.  I will do follow up article soon, on how to get that impossibly thin case open and do some tinkering…

A little while back I mentioned about some plans to do some work overseas,

I am pleased to announce my plans. I am going to be volunteering for Bridges for Peace a Christian charity working with Jews in Israel. Their headquarters is in Jerusalem and I am going to be there providing IT support to the staff there. This is role is unsalaried, to many people this seems like a crazy idea but I am taking a step of faith to be provided with the means to live out there.

I will flying out there as soon as I get my visa, this should realistically be around the end of July as I wish to finish in the current contract I have at the moment and I going to a party of a close friend of mine in Oxford the week before.

Please keep this blog in your browser favourites and I will be mentioning more about what I am doing and life in the modern land of Israel.

A web site with the details of this project is nearly done and I will post a link soon.

Went out for breakfast and to play golf with friends from church at the Tenth Hole in Southsea. Had totally perfect weather and unbelievably I play the best round ever, with the exception of the first tee off. I managed to hit the right direction pretty much each hole, in the end our scores were great and all quite close. Fun day.

My blog has been horribly quiet for 6 months or more, with various writings I have intended to do lying half finished.

I intend to make up for this as there has been a whole load of exciting things happening and yet to come.

God has blessed with so many good things lately its hard to know where to begin.

In April 2007 I started working for NICE systems an Israel based software developer who have a UK office just outside of Southampton. From there I supported the engineers who produce and sell the software not just in that office but in other sites in several different parts of Europe as well as speaking to the other IT helpdesk in Ra’anana near Tel Aviv.

Whilst I was there I had some gut feelings there maybe other Christians with in the company. I found two other guys and we started meeting up and praying in a cafe across the road, one more joined us later. I was inspired by the group of Christians I met when I was working for vehicle leasing giant Inchcape a few years ago. Meeting other Christians in the workplace is quite different from conventional church. For a start people are more honest, we can put on a front when we are church when work is stressful, where as having fellowship with colleagues you understand each other responsibilities and be able to build each other up and encourage. I think its important to state this is not a substitute for having church, and also shouldn’t be a way to bad mouth other people, managers or the company, at the end of the day although we are not perfect we are all ambassadors for Christ.

Anyway I felt God telling me I needed to visit Israel again but this time as a volunteer with some kind of charity. In October 2008 my contract came to an end I was stuck with wondering what to do next. The day after my last day I went to a Microsoft conference in London as I got a free ticket as part of their Technet newsletter to hear the unveiling of Windows 7 and Steve Balmer himself was doing the talking. Balmer is just like what you can imagine him to be, he has bounds of passion and enthusiasm to keep Microsoft still the giant in IT, even if there business practices and security holes draw a lot of crticism.

After lots of frantic of emailing Cvs I got an interview for Southampton NHS trust, which resulted in a success and I started the next day. The first week was not good. For a start I was always getting late, regardless how early I left, I ended up allowing an hour and three quarters to get in, after some changes to my journey and getting a Tomtom, using the motorway the whole distance, I had a really good time to work with and some great people like Darren, Juan and Luke did a great job of getting me upto speed in learning the ropes even though it seemed quite different from the other NHS trust I worked in Portsmouth.

Hospitals are some people’s idea of a worse nightmare as an employer, being institution of disinfectant and bureaucracy. But working for a government organisation is one of the safest bets in a recession nervous country, I actually found the NHS is a very good employer, its the best paid job I have had, I got plenty of variation in terms of departments to visit and problems to solve, part of this that when I was a child I wanted to be a Doctor. This time I wasn’t limited to one particular location instead I was required to fix IT problems on site by users desks and drive there. I didn’t have my own patch to cover, instead I was largely covering as and when the other engineers were busy with a project or off sick or on holiday, this turned out to be a thoroughly enjoyable role as I got to visit clinics and hospitals in Winchester, New Milton, Eastleigh, Totton, New Forest area as well as Southampton.

One of the best parts of the role was visiting sites in the New Forest. I spent a lot of time camping out here as a child, and in the last few years have been a couple of time prayer walking around places like Lyndhurst. Being alone with nature provides a perfect environment to be alone and get your thoughts together and seek God. For me being able to stop for an hour and easily get a cornish pasty and walk around the scrub heath, see horses and maybe take a few pictures, I cant think of a better way to spend my lunch break.

Just before April 2009 as it was coming up to financial year, my contract could no longer continue due to lack of budget. Yet again I was stuck wondering what my next job would be, I got two lots of good news in one week……

As someone who worked for a large scale clone PC manufacturer, built and upgraded clone PCs and also fixed, upgraded and supported brand name PCs (Dell, HP, etc) I thought I would share my experiences and dispell any myths that surround different types of PCs.

For a while now, if you are or were a gamer or PC enthusiast it was thought if your own PC wasn’t built yourself you didn’t have any hairs on your chest. The challenge of piecing together a PC from its standardised parts of motherboard, processor, memory, hard disk, optical drive etc, can be rewarding and you can get everything set up exactly the way you want it, and its cheaper! Or is it?

Clone PCs

When I worked for Novatech, customers would buy all the parts but some people would frequently buy the wrong parts or not have all the knowhow to make their PC work often blaming the retailer.

My experience has found clone PC parts like the case and power supply often come in two varieties, cheap and nasty or good and expensive. Many PC cases I have seen are utterly awful, the steel case is made of very thin bendy steel, with brittle plastic trim, and why is it you have to have a transparent window on the side? Also cheap power supplies can fail, either by one of the individual voltage rails might say, read 4.5v instead of 5v causing the PC to reboot or bluescreen inexplicably. On the other side of the market is products from companies like Coolermaster or Zalman, these are specialist PC part makers and these are often usually very expensive. There often isnt much to choose from in the middle of the market. Really there should be a better range of MicroATX cases, as most motherboards come in this format (ie: smaller having only 3 or so slots) The average clone PC case is far too big having far more space and expansion than anyone would ever need. Does anyone need more than two 5 ¼ drive bays now?

Frequent problems PC builders can get into are, cant install Windows as wont recognise hard disk, solution: have floppy disk handy (yes you still need a floppy drive for this aspect of installing your operating system which seems crazy when they havent been used in such a long time) with the Serial ATA drivers on, if your PC has a hard disk with those narrow style cables, and no, you cant get the drivers on a CD or USB stick. A PC not POSTing (that means Power On Self Test, ie: getting a picture on the monitor, counting its memory and ready to boot off a storage device) can often be 12v cable not plugged into motherboard (this is needed for PCs of Pentium 4 or Athlon 64 or later) a brass spacer or screw stuck behind the motherboard in the wrong place causing a short, or bad memory.

If the PC thats newly build happens to be defective, the retailer will expect the customer to do the troubleshooting and bring back the correct part. This can be a real headache if the user cannot work out which piece is the cause of the malfunction, and this can be why building PCs can be a painful experience for some.

The home built PC gaming crowd generates a lot of money for computer retailers as people upgrade so frequently as people want a certain amount of oneupmanship on gaming forums, and specialist parts like watercooling kits are often sold, all this adds up to a very expensive way of keeping and maintaining a computer though.

Ready-clone PCs, these are often can be a bad choice for a business customer, why? The parts change regulary, so large companies cant make a mass copy of the same Ghost image onto hundreds of PCs.

Brand name PCs like HP and Dell.

Some people might not like HP and Dell as their PCs have non standard parts. The chassis on these brand systems often is different, often coming in about 3 or difference sized cases often with the same motherboard. This is often a good thing, someone like the NHS has its PCs in small form factor, this is useful as the PC can be carried by the staff under one arm, and if you are installing 6 machines in one day, being able to fit them all in your car and carry each of them up steps and through security doors etc is different a good thing to factor in.

Now, most large businesses only have a small number of different model PCs, as Dell or HP normally keep the specification the same of the PC the same for a whole year. Most IT departments of big businesses need to keep installation of new system up or re-setting up after a repair or a operating system crash as quick as possible. In a business setting, PCs are rolled out using Ghost images,

Fitting a card to a brand name PC:-

Open lid, often PC can be opened with out tools using some kind of lever or button on outside of PC, remove lever covering slots on backplane of PC, slide out metal bracket, fit card. Reassemble.

Install required software.

Fitting a card to clone PC:-

Use philips screwdriver to remove screws from left hand side panel, struggle to make panel slide backwards, which will need good fingernails or flat screwdriver. Find metal plate covering slot you want to use, stab these piece hard with your screwdriver, give nasty sharp piece of metal a twist to break it off. Cut finger. Bleed a bit and swear. Fit card in slot, look through boxes of screws for a screws to find one that fits to hold the card in. Put PC together, put the side panel on a bit wonky. Install required software.

Replacing CD drive on a brand name PC:-

Open lid, often PC can be opened with out tools using some kind of lever or button on outside of PC. Disconnect ribbon cables and power cable on CD drive, squeeze drive rails to make CD drive slide out. Remove rails with screwdriver and transfer them onto new CD drive and set jumpers on the unit and refit into PC and reattach cables. Close case and start up PCs.

Replacing CD drive on clone PC:-

Use philips screwdriver to remove screws from left hand side panel, struggle to make panel slide backwards, which will need good fingernails or flat screwdriver. Then realise you need the other side of the PC off to access before sets of screws. Disconnect ribbon cables and power cable on CD drive, remove two screws off each side. Slide in replacement drive and fit screws to and set jumpers accordingly on back drive. Put both side panels back on the wrong way round, then put them on correctly.

My point is, after playing with different style of PCs, clone type systems are useful from the fact they are design to be easily adapted but quality is not always great, and PCs for businesses are different purely as they are made and produced with businesses in mind and are easier to replace bits with a minimum of tools.

Sometime ago I wrote a serialised article about Microsoft Office (2003) and some of its shortcomings, I thought I would talk about Office 2007 and its free open source rival Open Office.

Office 2007

Ribbon.

The main selling point is the ribbon interface which will implemented into all of Microsoft’s future applications. One of the good things about Microsoft Office was the fact the user interface and icon toolbars were consistent after each version had come out Office 97, Office 2000 and Office XP (also called Office 2002) then Office 2003, but with Office 2007 Microsoft decided to make a big stride forward and change a lot with an overhaul of how the menu features work.

Initial signs look good, the icons look pretty and neat. However, the icons rearrange themselves in a fashion after analysing which functions you use most frequently. This seems like a good idea in theory, but actually my thinking is users will hate it. The reason why is icon should stay in the same place and not move, the buttons in your car don’t change around, everything should be consistent so during training whether from a book or from a teacher, people are not confused. Some icons were absent when I was using Word, a simple item like ‘find and replace’ was not there, easy enough for an IT person like me to use Control F, but not for a typical office worker, I think this whole ribbon concept a total waste of time.

Apart from the ribbon, the other worthwhile note is the button in the top left hand corner, works like a Windows Start button in reverse, pressing this gives a list of menu functions for saving, printing etc, instead of along the top, this is somewhat confusing to office workers and IT professionals alike, also takes some getting used to.

Improvements.

Word 2007 and Excel 2007 look radically different with the ribbon interface but strangely Outlook 2007, looks more or less like Outlook 2003 with the small exception of a new search button easily finding key words in your mail. Normally before you had to right click on inbox and search from there. As its something you use often it makes sense to move it to somewhere prominent, good effort there MS.

My many critical point of previous versions of Outlook was its poor way of storing mail in archives, I have not had a chance to really see how this differs in Outlook 207 though.

Overall there’s not a lot of other bits that have changed. Really as the last few versions of Office have had graphics, colour text, spell and grammar checking etc, its hard to think of anything extra that could be useful for the average business.

Compatibility.

Some aspects of the .DOC file format has changed with introduction of Office 2007. Not sure what differences these are, but one of my previous workplaces rolled out the Office 2007 compatibility add on for Office 2003 (they have 2007 on a trial but had no plans to actually go live) which lets you open the newer files transparently in 2003.

Business.

Office 2007 is available very cheaply (I think about £17) to NHS workers for the last few years, the NHS, being Microsoft’s biggest client in the UK gets a unique ‘all you can eat’ licence deal agreement for Windows and Office on as many PCs as they want, so to keep a very firm stranglehold on keeping MS Office in our health systems right through to the 201x’s. Also there are generous discounts to students and teachers with Educational editions of Office 2007 as was offered in its previous incarnation, obviously a making sure our children and students only grow up using one set of tools to do their course work.

The full version for businesses in both retail (in those funny new curved cereal type boxes) or as a volume licence edition for businesses is still pretty high as before.

Open Office 3

This free alternative is strikingly similar to Office 2003 in terms of the application’s layout which is no bad thing. Loading / saving files, editing, tables, printing is all very very similar to Office 2003.

The thing I like about it is that its easy to pick up and start using it straight away, as its consistent in use.

Open Office doesnt have a mail client in use, but if you want a different free alternative you can instead use Firefox’s creator Mozilla’s Thunderbird.

Compatibility.

Open Office using its own .ODF or Open office Document File format, which makes a lot of sense in having a new generic format thats not tied to one vendor but intended to be established standard for all office applications everyone in true ethos that is part of free software by having the inner workings of the product available for people to dissect in detail should they want to.

The sad fact is the .DOC and .XLS format for Word and Excel respectively have been around for so long, its exremely hard to imagine anything changing that, especially when businesses exchange files with each other. “its Open what standard?” or “We cannot open your CV, did you send the right file?” is situations I can see happening.

Some government organisation in France and Germany have adopted Linux and Open Source software and made it work for them as well as save a huge amount of money, so it would be interesting to see how they made it through this scenarios.

Conclusion.

Just because a piece of software is free it by no means its amateurish or cuts corners on quality, the team of volunteers that put together seem to do a great job and updates and patches are available as an when needed like any other software application. Like Firefox, Open Office now has a plug in system to load on bolt on extras onto your application suite to any extra customisation where needed, also is support for numerous different languages both with the menus and help systems and support for non-European alphabets as well.

Overall, using Open Office for my own requirements at home works extremely well and I am very pleased with it.

IT managers looking to consider Office 2007 should really trial this well as I think a lot of retraining would need to be done for end users as its likely confusion will result with its usability.

Features not on mobile phones we would like to see…..

People are often complain mobile phones do too many functions, therefore become overcomplicated and consequently get unreliable and difficult to use.

I have personally thought a few things (as far as I am aware) that dont exist. I expect iPhone and Blackberry users may have some of these exist as additional applications, but here they are…

Battery Stretch.

Users of Lenovo’s (new name for IBM’s PCs after being sold to a Chinese maker) Thinkpads, have quite a handy feature called Battery Stretch, this is something you can turn on if you are working on the move away from a power socket and urgently need to get work finish before the battery dies. Its quite simple, all the superfluous features of the laptop can be turned off or adjusted in one simple control panel, to give you maximum operating time. This includes turning off, sound, bluetooth, wireless networking and dimming the screen, this same technology could be used when you need your phone just to make a critical call and the battery is low.

Underground maps.

Infrequent users of the London Underground like me (I like to go to London about 3 times a year) have to rely on the maps on the wall to work out where to get anywhere and know which lines to get on. Of course, phones and GPS units are useless many hundreds of metres below ground, but this can be worked around. Heres one of two methods with varying amount complexity: 1/ Just one large static map on the screen that can be scrolled around or zoomed in, with a search feature a user can enter the first 3 letters of a place to zoom in on a specific location. 2/ A fully working map that gives you a list of the required route to get from A to B, updates are beamed to the phone when you are in town so its always upto date. 3/ as 2 but with realtime information of pricing costs for normal tariffs and when using Oyster cards, and regular updates of engineering works and other disruptions.

Traffic and weather RSS feeder

As someone who commutes 1 hour each way to Southampton, traffic is often bad and accidents are frequent, I would like my phone to fetch some brief details of my journey to work and anything I need to know. I would like to enter a profile of my home and work locations, and receive quick information of traffic disruption and weather, the phone can send an alert earlier than normal if snow or heavy weather is expected so I can wake up and leave the house earlier or maybe even get the train.

In part 2, I would like to ask Ed what are the good dos and donts of Podcasts.  Ed likes to watch, promote and produce different types of audio and video media on the web and in person, hes off to do some new and exciting challenges very soon which is mentioned on his site.

When listening myself to some Podcasts, sometimes there is a tendency for general waffling, you know you want to listen to an expert on the subject of something and the person speaking spends a while talking about what he had for dinner and other irrelevant items, but in the days of the internet most people want to get an answer quickly from something like doing a search on google or wikipedia, where as podcasting people are less likely to be in a hurry for an answer to a question, I think its important to be right on subject, but in a friendly and chatty sort of way.

So, for Ed, what makes a good podcast, what good and bad methods have you seen of any kind published audio, and can you maybe put in brief glimpses of what will talked about next time to keep the public interested and come again for more?  Adverts and sponsors, can they be a good thing if brief and relevant to the subject?

of course, comments from anyone are appreciated, but remember I am more interested in personal ideas rather that go to xyz link.

ok, this is the first of two open questions, I thought I would ask two good friends of mine some opinions of something they are both experienced on with the intention they could respond on their blogs.

First gonna ask my bro in law Jim, on hiking.  Jim is a keen walker and lover of many things outdoors.  I like camping but I have only been experienced on camping on the normal organised type affairs in places like the New Forest and Yorkshire.  I have been asked by a friend to go camping (unsure whether UK or abroad yet) rucksack style (ie no proper toilets and other civilised things) and need a bit of advice.

Rather just use google and go to such and such a link for this, I wanted to ask Jim being a veteran of this genre, what is the ideal way to pack and prepare for this sort of trip.

Some of the things I need to think about is food, stuff thats good for you, tastes good and is easy to carry.  I have a reasonable rucksack and lightweight tent but not much else, would need to consider other things like small first aid kit and other things, where as minimising the weight of stuff to carry.