At some point in between feeding my Twitter addiction and getting a Poker website ready I decided to reformat my big computer after putting up with a few problems for a long, long time. Silverlight was bombing on me, Google Chrome was locking up (blaming Flash) and nothing really worked as it was meant to.
The initial reformat and reinstall went OK, but during the Windows Update->Reboot cycle I got a Blue Screen of Death and things went downhill from there.
My SATA refused to boot. Thinking this could simple be a corrupt MBR problem I booted from my XP CD into the recovery console, tried FIXMBR and FIXBOOT and restarted. I got the same problem – invalid system disk – an decided to reformat again completely. Two hours town the pan so far, but what the hey.
No deal – I still can’t boot from SATA, so I waded through the BIOS options, resetting to safe defaults and going from there, and still my SATA won’t fire up. I eventually removed the Work drive to a safe place and reformatted my backup drive – a 250GB PATA that’s normally in a removable mobile rack – to boot from. This went OK, and I installed Windows, Office and all the combined updates for both.
What’s annoying is that the SATA drives themselves are absolutely fine, mounting in Windows no problem – I just can’t boot from the damned things. I’ve tried all three that I own, two 120s and a 250GB, and they all respond the same. No booting.
I still needed a backup drive, so I plonked down £9.98 on a SATA mobile rack and reformatted the 250 SATA for use as a backup. The idea is that I copy all the files over from C: and D: (now partitions on the 250 PATA, rather than individual SATAs) using SyncToy 2.0 and yank it to store in a safe place. I originally had both my work drive and backup drive encrypted with TrueCrypt, but I just don’t want to push my luck right now.
So now I he a pair of 120GB SATAs sat doing nothing. I could possibly set them up in a simple striped RAID0 config so store my work on, then reformat the PATA as one big lump, but do I really want to go through all that hassle? It’s not as if I need the space.
The battery in my tiny laptop has struggled to hold a charge properly for the last few weeks, so I decided now would be a great time to partake in the battery exchange programme and get this unit swapped out for a non-Sony-blow-uppable one.
I removed the battery and entered the serial numbers into the Fujitsu site, completed my name and address and submitted the form. ETA on a new battery was 4-6 weeks due to the model – which is no longer available – but I was pleasantly suprised to receive a replacement via TNT this morning, a little over a week later.
The battery already held some charge and seems to be holding well so far. With the lower risk of the thing setting fire to my nuts, I’m pretty happy with the entire situation. All that remains is for me to send the old battery back in the pre-paid TNT envelope provided, and we’re done.
Update: 20 Jan. The new battery makes a vast, vast difference to how the laptop operates. It may be my imagination, but YouTube videos are much smoother now, and my whole usability experience is slightly less frustrating.
One this that has definitely improved is the recharge temperature. The laptop no longer tries to charge the battery when it should be full, and as a result it’s nice and cool when I go to pick it up in the morning.
After a recent disaster of epic proportions that was made all the worse by not having an Internet connection, I bought myself a USB Mobile Broadband Modem – all the mobile phone shops are touting them at the moment but I decided (not sure why) to get mine direct from Three. Ordered it late on Wednesday afternoon and it arrived on Friday morning.
It’s bigger than a USB memory stick but not massively so. I plumped for the white one which looks rather spiffing, and it comes with a white USB extension cable, a few leaflets and a SIM card. It mounts as a CD-Rom drive and the software is on the stick itself, so no discs to lose. Your SIM fits in a tight little jacket which slides into the unit just below the USB connector and stays out of sight from there on. There’s also a MicroSD slot, so it can act as a regular USB memory stick as well.
Three USB Modem
Three USB Modem
Three USB Modem
The first time I plugged it in the internal memory mounted. Double-clicking on it auto-booted the installer and… That was it. No muss no fuss. The software checks for updates (which I downloaded over Wifi rather than use up my allowance) and is generally unobtrusive, comprising a small window with a network status display and a big red Connect/Disconnect button.
I connected to 3G on the first attempt despite only having three bars. Access was impressively quick – this one goes up to 2.8Mb I think – and there were no problems connecting over Telnet or anything like that. It pretty much did exactly what it said on the tin.
Three USB Software
A couple of months ago I installed a bandwidth meter on my small laptop and found that I used 1.3GB (combined up/down) over the 30 day trial period of the software. Since I use WiFi and even wired where possible, I can quite easily get away with just 1GB a month, costing me a ternner, without worrying about extra charges.
So far so good! I’ve done a little bit of web browsing on it and checked my email while doing 60mph on the M180 (no, not driving) and it’s all been spot on so far.
Update: 10th November
There was a brief period of about half an hour this morning where there was no three network available at all and I couldn’t connect. It was annoying that I actually wanted to do something at that time as well. It’s back on now (using it to post in fact).
On the weekend I went off to Scotland to climb Ben Nevis my router decided to pack in on me. No amount of resetting, prodding, poking or power starvation would fix it – the power LED would glow, flickering slightly, and that was that.
A whole month later I finally get time to sit down and contact Netgear about it. The process is fairly straightforward and we arrange for A NOVO to come and collect the duff unit, with CityLink due to drop a new one in sometime in the week.
Except yesterday, while I was packing up the unit ready for collection, the Cable Modem decided to quit. It’s worth mentioning that this is the original Motorola Surfboard modem that can back in the day when Diamond Cable was my provider and NTL was nothing but a distant rumour. I think it had been on for roughly seven years straight.
Calling the 25p/min support number got me straight through to a helpful customer service rep who arranged for a new modem to be delivered in 5-7 days, so for the time being I am completely without internets at home.
What kind of logic process does it involve to purposely upset and annoy your customers with crippled products for the sake of a few pence?
A friend of ours was was unfortunate enough to suffer a harddrive failure on her Advent 7081 laptop – not a bad machine really – rendering the drive as dead as the proverbial Dodo. The laptop wouldn’t even POST properly, so I took the drive out – sure enough it got further and asked for a valid media to be inserted. To be double-plus-good sure I stuck the 2.5in drive on an adapter and put it into my main machine. The drive didn’t even show up in the device manager as being damaged – it was completely dead, so I ordered a new one from eBuyer, £40 delivered next day, 80GB. Sweet!
First problem: No restore discs. We hunted high and low for the system restore discs but there was nothing, nor was there a Windows CD anywhere to be found. No, instead of including a few pence worth of plastic, Advent had thoughtfully put the restore sortware on the harddrive. The harddrive that was now dead. Ahahah, great!
So I acquired an original Windows XP Home OEM CD and stuck that in there, but the licence number on the bottom of the laptop – a perfectly legal number supplied with this actual laptop – won’t allow this version of XP to install. I now have the choice of [a] buying a new XP Home pack from somewhere, [b] getting a new set of restore discs from Techguys on 0870 901 6000 (which costs about £30), or [c] trying to find either of the above on eBay.
Who on earth thought this was a good idea? At what point in the marketing progress did someone think it would be OK to screw over future users because it would save the cost of a CD? Not only does it make things awkward, but it uses up HD space that could otherwise be used by the laptop owner. Sheesh!
Moral of the story: Don’t buy a laptop with the restore stuff on the HD. If you have no choice, get something onto removable media ASAP in case you need it.
As detailed in my original post, I’ve been struggling with a disappearing D: drive for quite some time now. To date I have:
Bought a new drive.
Used a different SATA connector
Used a different SATA cable
Used a separate SATA card
None of which helped in the slightest. I finally stumped up some serious cash (excluding an entire new HD, because it was twice the size of the old one) and bought a new PSU, the Enermax Liberty 500W PSU from eBuyer. It did, indeed, solve my problems, but I feel the PSU needs elaborating upon.
The standard glossy cardboard packaging doesn’t prepare you for what lies within. The first thing is the Molex/SATA power cables which are separate from the PSU body to allow you to only used as many as you require. There are standardised ones for board power, but the drive cables are use-as-you-please to assist with cable management. As a nice touch, the Molex power connectors employ a ’squeeze-to-release’ design to make things that little bit easier.
That should be enough, but Enermax are heavily involved in the gaming aspect of computing, and as such you’ll also find case stickers, what appears to be a bookmark and even a lanyard for your all important computer game show ID. All Enermax branded, naturally.
As usual, a serious PSU weighs an absolute ton and is built like a tank. The housing sports a humongous fan requiring lower RPM and thus reducing noise, and everything just works first time. An advantage – at least for me – is that there are no bright blue LEDs casting an eerie glow around the back of your tower.
I’ve been avoiding doing too much work on the big desktop recently, since the HD has been acting up, disappearing from Windows and reappearing a few seconds later. Having replaced the drive and the cable, I plumped for a PCI SATA-II card from eBay and gave that a try.
Installation was pretty straightforward – plug in card, switch on machine, install drivers, reboot – and I connected the 250GB drive without hassle, with Windows picking it up and scanning it, reporting 20K in bad sectors into the bargain.
I set about doing a full HD Scan and Repair and – so far – things have gone well. Later tonight I’ll probably get my backups sorted out, reformat the drive and hope for the best.
I bought mine from eBay user huntgoal for £7.90 delivered – bargain.
For the past few weeks I’ve been lugging the beast to work and back over the weekend to use there, since it’s all set up to do Apache, MySQL and so on and so forth and I’m far more comfortable working within Windows than on a Mac. Sadly, a fault developed with one of the drives, and we decided it was a perfect time (ie, before it went bang) to replace it with a proper, dedicated machine. After a bit of mooching aroundf the Internets, we settled on the Dell Vostro 200ST.
Struggling with Dell’s online order system isn’t an hour I’d wish on anyone, especially when it decides to delete any reference to a machine specification you’ve just put together and insist that you haven’t actually done it. Just grin and bear it, it’s worth the hassle to save a few quid, right? As it turns out, yes it is.
We were forced into choosing the Vostro because it appears to be the cheapest, slickest unit available with a DVI connector. We plumped for 2GB of memory and an Intel Core Duo and the whole lot came out at £329 including VAT and Delivery. The order was placed on Thursday afternoon and, despite Walsh Western’s insistance they had no record of the order, the unit was delivered at lunchtime the following Monday. Great service so far!
Extracting the machine from it’s box reveals a low-profile cast that weighs an absolute ton. No Mac Mini, this – it’s some serious weight due to the ample metal grills and facias used in the machine’s contruction. A carrying handle would have been nice, but the slimline tower fits under an arm with ease. You do need to hold on tight, however, because the case is seriously glossy, giving an air of quality lacking from a lot of pre-build machines.
The whoosh of a handful of fans when the power was first applied was a bit disconcerting, but they soon decided there was nothing in danger of overheating and turned themselves off again. For a terrible instant I thought we’d got a duff one, but all was well and the machine is – to my admittedly badly-damaged hearing – silent.
Booting up, the initial Dell EULA screen forgoes any mouse input and insists you’ve accepted the terms and conditions by pressing any key on the keyboard. Although I didn’t try it (I tapped Cursor Down to see if there was any further info and they got me that way – naughty!), this presumably includes the Escape key, so quite what would happen there I don’t know.
Getting through the Agreement and the initial Windows language options was pretty much as easy as it could be,. but the first time I got to the Windows desktop I ran into a VBScript error – with some bundled crapware from Roxio was blame. Not a great first impression.
Neither was the sheer amount of crud that infested the desktop and boot settings. Internet accounts from Tiscali and Orange, software popping up from Roxio and McAfee and even teh Google Desktop Search and Toolbar installed by default. No thanks, you guys – my first port of call was to install HijackThis and disable half the options in my startup config. A quick reboot later – and it was quick this time – and we’re up and running with a much quicker machine.
Ther aforementioned DVI connectivity is handled with aplomb by the half-height ATI Radeon XT1300 Pro which was more than enough to fill both of my Dell 2007FPs in all of their 1600×1200 glory. There was a small amount of pixel jumping going on when I first put the machine on a 2001FP, but this settled down after some software stripping and hasn’t occurred since. To attach your monitors a pair ot Y-Shaped cables are supplied – one sporting a pair of DB9s and the other a pair of DVIs, but no mixing of the two.
The dual-monitor configuration is easy enough to use, though a little less professional than the nVidia equivalent. I set the system up as two seperate monitors – each of which can have their own, independent resolution – and all was just, it just worked. With the cruft removed, and Windows XP back in ‘Windows Classic’ mode, the machine simply flies along thanks to it’s ample memory and dual-core CPU. Even the mouse and keyboard – the absolute cheapest we could get from Dell – are not bad.
I feel I’m in danger of falling for a Dell machine and I need to stop, wake up and find something seriously wrong with it, but I just can’t. The amount of software that starts at boot time is annoying, and that could do with some serious attention, but the machine itself outweighs all of that.
Overall: 9/10 – Great machine let down a little by installed crap.
Mini-Update: After a few days I’ve noticed that – in the vertical position at least – the CD drive tray sticks on the hinged drive bay cover on it’s way back into the case. It doesn’t stick when it’s being opened, just when it’s being closed. A minor niggle.
I’ve been having problems with my D: drive disappearing momentarily at random intervals, and since that’s the drive with all my work on, I decided to replace it with a bigger drive before it died completely.
The replacement arrived today and turned out to be a slimmer version than expected. While the machine was open I took the opportunity to pad a couple of the fans with paper to stop them rattling in their cages, cutting my thumb on my small but very sharp pocket knife in the process.
The new drive installed and formatted without problems, and my backup (yes, I’ve learned my lesson!) restored. This is the bit where I find it was the mainboard on it’s way out and not the drive.
I finally got to use both 2007FP monitors as well – they’re pretty damned good.
A few month ago I had a purple and green bar appear the full height of my monitor. It was independent of any screen resolution since it appeared in the same place and at the same size every time, and was quite obviously a fault with the monitor. The problem I had was that it was intermittent – the worst kind of fault.
For the past few days I’ve had the ‘Son of Scanlines’ back with me. Without fail, a green bar vertically on the screen, full height, will appear every time the monitor is first switched on. After 30-60 minutes it would fade out, but was easily reproduced by allowing the monitor to go into standby mode and waking it up again. It’s no longer an intermittent fault, and since the monitor comes with a 3yr warranty, it’s time to get it replaced.
I emailed Dell not without some trepidation, since the last time I attempted a warranty return on my laptop they just weren’t interested, fobbing me off with as many excuses as possible. I took pains to test the monitor under as many conditions as possible: the same monitor on a different computer; another monitor on the regular computer and even the same monitor on a different computer via VGA instead of DVI. All results were the same – the band of green appeared whenever the monitor was used.
So I emailed Dell, but even that was tricky since they require a system service tag in order to identify the system they’d sold me. Since I had bought the monitor as a standalone item, I didn’t have a service tag. Since I didn’t have a Case Number already, I couldn’t use the ‘Unresolved Issues’ form. In the end, while examining my original Dell Invoice, I found the address UKI_Customer_Care@Dell.com and used that.
To my pleasant surprise I received an email from Dell the next day, basically confirming my suspicions about the monitor and asking for contact and delivery information to arrange collection. I promptly emailed the info, and the monitor is to be collected on Friday.
So the first tip: Be sure to test as fully as possible because Dell will only ask you to do it anyway. If you test as much as possible and leave no get out, things will go much more smoothly.
Update: Wednesday, 12:29.
Received another email. From the sound of it, they’re sending me another monitor out and picking the old one up at the same time which seems like awfully good service on their part. We shall see.
Update: Thursday, 08:35.
Confirmed – they’re dropping off a replacement at the same time as picking up the duff one. I’ve emailed to confirm if the monitor stand is required as well (since it’s quite weighty). The duff unit is all boxed up ready to go and M has her instructions. So far, Dell have been pretty flawless. Dammit.
Update: Friday, 11:30.
SURPRISE! Dell managed to send me a different monitor completely. Instead of the 2001FP I have a 2007FPb waiting for me. A monitor so elusive that the only pictures I could find of it were on a chinese blog. And of course, it looks nothing like my other monitor. Great!
Sigh. I’ll email Dell back and see what they say this time.
Update: Tuesday 25th, 08:36.
After thinking about it over the weekend, and receiving an offer from Dell of a 2001FP in exchange, I’ve decided to keep the new monitor and buy a second 2007FP to match. As far as I can tell, the 2007FPb is a model in the 2007FP product range, so they should be identical. My current 2001FP is just out of warranty, sadly, so I’ll probably stick it on eBay.
