Archive for the 'Hardware' Category


Gigabyte GA-7VT600 Motherboard automatically shutting off

Saturday, June 20th, 2009

I’ve been struggling off and on with an issue on my Dad’s computer the last month or so. He said that it would occasionally just shut off completely out of the blue. (He also admonished me not to spend much time on it. Unfortunately problems like this are usually the ones that take the most […]

Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Netbook Remix on an Acer Aspire One ZG5 trackpad issues

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009

Recently I had the opportunity to work on an Acer Aspire One netbook. It’s rare that I get the chance to work on a linux desktop system for a client. Most of my desktop users that I support run Windows (although I primarily run linux on my machines.) I get to do a fair amount […]

What’s the oldest working computer hardware you still have?

Monday, December 29th, 2008

This is a good time of year to think about cleaning out your old electronic (junk) equipment and make room for the new. Now, I’ve had a tendency to hang onto legacy hardware longer than I should. (I’m sure I could dig up a working 5 1/4″ drive somewhere and probably a motherboard that would […]

Dell Mini Notebooks – Very Nice

Monday, December 15th, 2008

I’ve seen these new mini notebooks and they look VERY nice. They’re about the size of a small book which makes for nice portability. It’s nice to see the small laptop form factor making a comeback. I really hope that this size laptop is around to stay for a while. I have an old Sony […]

Leaky Capacitors and Computer Instability

Monday, July 7th, 2008

Some time back I did an article here about leaky capacitors and linked to some really great photos of a “healthy” mainboard capacitor and “bulging” capacitors. The long-story short version is this… Once upon a time there was some corporate espionage among capacitor manufacturers. Someone had a really good electrolyte formula (the goo inside a […]

The Linksys WRT54GL and DD-WRT firmware

Monday, May 5th, 2008

I’ve had a couple of small wireless projects lately and have really been having a great time playing around with the Linksys-Cisco WRT54GL Wireless-G Broadband Router and one of the many GREAT 3rd party firmwares dd-wrt. I know, for a couple years I’ve meant to get a hold of one of these little linksys boxes […]

Good USB ThumbDrive – Kingston 8GB DataTraveler

Friday, May 2nd, 2008

Just thought I’d do a quick post – I’ve had kind of a poor track record in ordering USB thumb drives lately. I ordered one which I absolutely hate… it was about the size of one of those small pieces of gum and didn’t have the proper USB adapter on there so all you do […]

Replacing a Power Adapter for a Microtek Scanmaker 4800

Monday, February 11th, 2008

This is just a glimpse of the kinds of things I get to do day to day… A week or so ago I had a client that had received a used scanner from a friend. The scanner was a Microtek Scanmaker 4800. I was a bit concerned as her pc still has Windows 98 and […]

Nvidia video cards

Friday, December 7th, 2007

I’ve been looking at a new video card lately (X-Plane…) And am certain that many people are confused by Nvidia’s product lines of late… Here’s a nutshell idea…. They’re currently using 4 digit product numbers – like 7300, 7800, 8300, etc…. I found this breakdown in zdnets talkback…    Send article as PDF   

Hard drive testing utilities

Friday, December 7th, 2007

Windows users know chkdsk, linux users know fsck… users of each MIGHT have heard of SMART. These are different ways of TESTING hard drives. Well, there’s also a utility called TestDisk that looks promising for recovering data… Here’s the clip from their site. “free data recovery software! It was primarily designed to help recover lost […]

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