Just Try Again Tomorrow

I had to replace a motherboard on a laptop this morning. If you've never experience that, it's like a puzzle box. There's only one way everything fits together, all the pieces are tightly packed and if you miss something it sets you way back.

I took that thing apart and reassembled it at least 4 times. First it was a piece I didn't get put on in the right order. Then the keyboard didn't work (didn't secure the cable right). Now it's having an issue with the touch pad - which is the second most difficult item to remove (the motherboard is the first). I started to disassemble it a fifth time but just didn't have the strength.

So I get home and the new hard drive for my laptop is here. I've brought home some cloning software from work so it should be an easy switch. After trying four different hard drives to dump the image onto, utilizing several different connection methods, I finally started dumping the image. When it jumped up to 33 hours left I shut it off. Something wasn't right and I think it was me.

I'll take a nice 8-hour nap and recharge my mojo and attack all of it again tomorrow.

Isn't That Just Craptastic

I have a Toshiba laptop that I was given about a year ago. It used to belong to my nephew and the power adapter went out, then the LCD panel went bad. When I received it, I bought a second-hand power adapter and checked the problem with the LCD. When you turn on the computer, the LCD starts out fine but quickly turns into something resembling a Picaso painting then just freezes there. I plugged in an external monitor and it was fine. Ergo, bad LCD.

I finally got around to spending the $50 or so to get a replacement LCD off eBay and it arrived this evening. I have just spent 90 minutes removing the old LCD and installing the new one. I fired it up and got... nothing. The new LCD had no image (no, it's not the inverter). I plugged the old LCD back in and got... nothing. I just plugged in an external monitor and got... nothing.

It appears that the video card has now gone South.

Anybody want to buy a used Toshiba laptop with a new LCD panel and a bad video card?

UPDATE: WOOHOO! It works! Turns out the RAM was seated wrong. This update is being written on the repaired laptop.

I'm A Pod Person

I borrowed a sync cable from one of my student employees last night so I could see about getting some music onto the iPod. It was still being a bit flaky so I decided to try and revive it. It took me about 3 hours but I think it was worth it.

I downloaded some utilities and set to running a health check scan on the hard drive. Sure enough, it failed but it was still spinning pretty well so there was hope. I attempted to format the drive using Windows but it kept hanging at 5-7%. I finally did a full low-level format. I wiped out EVERYTHING - even, supposedly, the partition information.

The little iPod must have done something to the drive itself because when I plugged it back in, it showed up with a drive letter. I proceeded to format... and it still had trouble. I switched to the Vista machine and it seemed to be doing better and I thought it was oging to work but it said the format failed. I eventually did a quick format (which doesn't scan the drive as it formats) and got signs of life.

I went back to the recovery instructions and, after all that work, read that the format doesn't have to finish, it just has to destroy enough information to let iTunes think that there's nothing on the drive.

I fired up iTunes and plugged in the pod. Sure enough, iTunes came up with, "It looks like this unit is in recovery mode... let me fix that for you" and it did. I haven't had a lick of trouble with it since then. I know the hard drive is still going bad and could croak at any minute but, hey, it was $10.50. I've got nothing to complain about.

The other positive is that the battery appears to be in great shape. I let it charge overnight and started playing tunes when I got to work at 8:00. It made it to noon and still has a little over half a charge left... not bad. Not bad at all.

I Should Have Played The Powerball

There's been a lot going on lately that I have wanted to tell you about or comment about but I just haven't been able to make the time to get the posts written. Then, when I do have time, I generally can't recall exactly what I was going to write about which is why I posted my last post.

One of the things I was going to write about was this weekend. The post would have been written in future tense but since the weekend is now over it will be written in past tense.

The middle nephew graduated from High School this weekend. Sunday, to be exact. We drove up to Kansas City, then up to Linneus, MO (about 2 hrs NE of KC) for the doings. There are 4 or 5 small towns (populations 200 to 500) in the county and I'm pretty sure it's a consolidated school. Even at that, there were only 18 people in his graduating class.

Side note: When we left for KC on Saturday, we had been on I-35 for 15 to 20 minutes and saw the Tornado Intercept Vehicle (TIV1). We were heading North, it was heading South.

The small number of graduating seniors in his class doesn't in any way diminish the fact that M was 3rd in his class. The valedictorian and salutatorian were both major overachievers (that's not a bad thing). We are very proud of all of my brother's kids. Given the cards that life has dealt them, any or all of them could have easily written off their education and underachieved but none of them did. E graduated, went into the Army reserves and is now working on a college degree. N graduated with his HS diploma and Associates degree on the same day through a special academy in Missouri. M just graduated 3rd in his class with scholarships to pursue his chosen career of Funeral Director/Mortician (at least he'll never have a lack of clientele). B is a basketball star set to graduate next year and will probably end up with some sort of scholarships himself. Q is coming into his own and is shaping up to be just as smart and active as his brothers. I am proud of all of them... yeah, I know I already said that but I figure it's worth repeating.

Now, to explain the title.

When I got to KC on Saturday, I had an email from Sprite Backup. Sprite Backup is a backup program for windows Mobile devices. My phone came with a lite version pre-installed which has saved my bacon more than once. Anyway, they were running a contest to give away a copy of the latest version so I entered... and promptly forgot I even entered until I got the email this weekend. I didn't win the software but I did win 3rd prize which was an 8GB MicroSD card. Not too shabby.

But wait, there's MORE!

In mid-to-late-April, Pantech, AT&T and 26 blog sites started a contest to give away 26 Pantech Matrix Pro phones, each with a $100 AT&T gift card for activation or accessories or whatever. The contest rules were decided by the individual sites. Some of them asked for essays about anything from the best ways to using cloud computing to why do you need this phone. The ones I entered (about 15 of them) required entries about the contest on personal blogs, comments posted to the contest announcement or tweets about the site and the contest.

When I got home this evening, I had received a private message from the site administrator of GearLive saying that I had won their contest! I am so excited! I've just been getting stuff left and right this weekend... which now explains the title.

Small Victories

When I got home from work this evening, there was an envelope sitting on my side of the bed. I asked my wife, who was sitting on her side of the bed working on her laptop, "What's this?"

In a thoroughly confused voice she replied, "It's a check."

Oddly enough, getting a check in the mail lately has not been good news. A particular group managed to screw up some insurance coverage I had and sent our premiums back. (long story that's not worth telling) So I carefully peered into the envelope thinking to myself, "what now?" As I slid the paper out, I read the word "Google" on the top and, for a brief instant, became extremely confused as to why Google would be sending me a check. When I actually looked at the amount of the check it hit me as to what it was and I just had to laugh.

In October of 2004, I signed up for Google AdWords. You know those relatively unobtrusive and easily ignorable "ads by Google" ad banners you see spread around on quite a few web pages? Those are Google AdWords. The site creator chooses to put those on his/her page and each time you or someone else clicks on one of those ads, he/she gets a credit. If enough clicks happen in a specified period of time during which there have been a particular number of impressions (displays of ads), those credits translate into real money. The month after your account credit reaches $100.00 or more, Google cuts you a check. Unless you have an imensely popular page, the credits don't rack up very quickly but they do add up. I got my first Google AdWords check today! To understand why I started laughing when I realized what the check was, I refer you back to the first sentence of this paragraph that mentions that I signed up for AdWords four years and three months ago!

Now, I told you that story to tell you this one.

If you've been following along, you know I am migrating my sound archive to a different management system. The sound archive has been the only one of my sites that has contained the AdWords banners. I have been debating whether or not to place them on the new site and receipt of the check closed the deal.

Not knowing enough about CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) or the CMS (Content Management System) I'm using and how it is structured, I knew that placing those banners where I wanted them to be on a page would be a challenge. Think of it this way. If you've been to the site, there is a menu that appears on the left side of pretty much everything but the home page and a few select others. I have had no idea what piece of the puzzle told it to be on the left and allow the page content to be just to the right of it.

You see, the only web technology I really ever learned was HTML. Programming and scripting languages are much like spoken languages in that, once you learn one, you can use it to relate to the others. In other words, if you know what the 'print' command does in language A, you know it's very similar to the 'write' command in language B which is similar to the 'echo' command in language C, etc. HTML is pretty specific about page layout. You [can] basically tell an element (text, picture, whatever) exactly where it is going to be on the page and how it should relate to the elements around it. When you're using CSS, you tell your HTML code to go ask the style sheet how things should look, where they should be placed, and how they should relate to the elements around it.

With that in mind, I went trudging through the CSS looking for the part that said 'the menu goes on the left, give a little bit of space, then put the page content to the right of it.' I couldn't find it. In HTML, you might use a table to accomplish this so I was looking for something similar. Finding the section that specified how the menu should look/act was easy enough but it didn't contain any code I could recognize for positioning.

After a couple hours of pulling my hair out (and those of you who know me are aware that I ain't got all that much left), it finally clicked. When it did, I began to understand how the CSS and the HTML related to each other. I built a little piece of code to to tell the provided AdWords script how it should display then told the core page types to utilize it. After a bit of fiddling with positioning in the layout and positioning of the command within the page, I had it right where I wanted it! Since I understood how it worked now, I made a coule of other minor changes to the layout while I was at it.

I'm not ashamed to say I'm proud of myself. I've been able to build this CMS from the ground up (you have to) and have managed to get it acting the way I want it to. And, given historical data, I should be receiving another $100 check in April of 2013.

Computer 2, Joe 1

It's stopped again. The spare PC is back to not POSTing. Maybe the CPU just had one last gasp in it... I dunno.

Anyone Have a Spare P4 CPU?

So I FINALLY got a case to put my spare computer in and guess what... it doesn't work. It worked fine when I took it apart to build the new one but when I put it back together - nada. It wouldn't even POST (that's the self test it does just before it makes that little beep to tell you it's okay and it will be booting now).

Having a wealth of available spare parts at work that I could use to test, I brought it in with me this morning. First thing I did was pop open a surplus P4 machine and swap the chip. Sure enough she fired right up. Unfortunately, even though the PC was in the surplus pile, I can't take the chip out of it. Something about proper and legal disposition of state property.

My suspicion is that I somehow zapped the CPU while removing the dust from the board just prior to reassembly. C'est la vie. It was a spare anyway.

So if anyone has a spare Pentium 4 CPU, let me know.

------------------------------
Update: I put my Celeron back on the board and decided to fire it up one more time just to be sure... seems to be working now. Still, I wouldn't mind upgrading to a true P4 so if you just happen to have one you're not using...

I'm Over Here...

Yeah, over here... behind the dismantled computer with the bad power supply and dead hard drive. I'll be back with you as soon as I can.

Reroute Power To The Main Deflector

As I stated in my previous post, using the external power got me up and running with both hard drives. I knew I had some funky things going on in there with Y-plugs, adapters, and fan splits so I took a good look at it. I juggled some things around and ended up swapping the power plug that had been running the DVD drives with the hard drives and actually ended up removing an unneeded power splitter. I plugged it all back together, fired it up and both hard drives are humming along.

On another note, I am playing with the idea of moving the blog off Blogger and on to my own domain. I have installed WordPress at unclebubby.com and will be experimenting over the next several days/weeks. If I can get WP to look the way I want and maybe get some cool plugins, I may just make the move. I'll keep you posted.

Power Corrupts

I have confirmed that my hard drive woes are due to power issues. I used the power supply from the IDE/SATA to USB interface cable I bought to power the 250GB drive and connected it to the MoBo data channel. I then set to copying a large amount of data to it last night and it was still running just fine when I got up this morning.

I also downloaded and installed Vista SP1 yesterday. It's not available through Windows Update at the moment but I have access to it through resources at work. I had heard there were some performance improvements but nothing spectacular. I don't know if I'm fooling myself or not but it does seem to be responding a bit better. So far, it hasn't broken anything.

I am in the midst of editing the photos from my niece's wedding. I hope I'll have them up soon.

You will also notice stars at the bottom of each post. I had to log on to my Haloscan account (Haloscan runs my commenting) and they now have ratings. I enabled them an viola. Please feel free to rate any post - past, present, or future - by simply clicking on the stars.

I (Still Don't) Have The Power, I Think

Swapping out the data cable on the older SATA hard drive was a definite improvement but, like I said, the system is still locking up after a while. I'm back to a power problem and here's why I think that.

I was wondering if it was something with the way the drive was formatted so I connected it last night with the intention of formatting it from within Vista (there's nothing on the drive right now). I couldn't get it to boot reliably. In my warped mind, I thought the drive was "sticky" because I used to leave it on 24/7 and thought that it had gotten a chance to cool. In an effort to "warm it up", I connected the power but not the data cable, turned on the machine, entered my password and went to bed. When I got up this morning, the machine was locked and hadn't completely initialized (the sidebar wasn't loaded yet). When I disconnected the second drive, everything came up fine.

Right now I'm running 3 fans (incl. processor), 2 DVD/RW drives, a floppy, at least one hard drive, a Radeon 9600 video card, a SB Live! audio card and whatever is built onto the MoBo on a 400 or 450 Watt power supply. It *should* be enough but I guess I'm in the market for an inexpensive 600W PS.

Still Troubled

I don't get it. I swapped out the data cable and now the system boots as quickly as it ever did. The secondary drive shows up correctly as a new volume. But try to actually DO anything and she'll freeze. Not right away, but she will eventually.

Here's the kicker. After writing zeros to the drive, re-initializing it in Windows and performing a complete format (and swapping out the data cable), I used the WD Data Lifeguard tools to perform a full scan on the drive. Yes, the same full scan that told me the drive was going bad about two months ago. Guess what it told me this time... the drive is fine. No errors. So, why won't the two drives play well together?

I was heading up to KC for my niece's wedding so I unplugged the spare drive for now.

There wasn't too much chaos when we arrived yesterday afternoon. My mother and sister were working on the flowers (my sister has some floral experience and agreed to do the flowers - what was she thinking?) and mom would later assemble the groom's cake, complete with John Deere tractor. My brother (the niece's dad) and the boys (her brothers) were all at the rehearsal and didn't return until after we all went to bed.

Right now, it's snowing in Kansas City. It's pretty cool, especially since it doesn't appear to be sticking to the roads. It should make for an interesting wedding. Precipitation on your wedding day is supposed to be good luck - was for me.

Before I ramble on too long, I'll close this chapter.

Would You Believe...

A bad data cable? I finally swapped out the data cable on the 250G drive and she fired up and is purring like a kitten. Perhaps the drive is fine and the cable was the culprit the entire time.

Reminds me of the time we had trouble with our VW van. It was never quite the same problem twice. One day it wouldn't start. Next day it wouldn't keep running. It would be fine for a couple days, then wouldn't even crank. We replaced the battery, checked the starter, even thought it might be a bad flywheel. Turned out to be a bad negative battery cable. Go figure.

I Have The Power, Or Maybe I Don't

I'm beginning to think my hard drive woes might be a power issue. I zeroed out the drive last night by hooking it up as a solo act inside the PC and running the WD tools. When I reconnected the primary and fired up the system, it came right up but, for some reason, locked up in the middle of the format.

When I tried connecting my IDE drive as well, it started making odd click-beep noises and wasn't responding. I currently have it hooked up externally on separate power and all is well. Not a click or a beep out of the thing.

I have two optical drives, a floppy (yes, I still have one), three fans, a sound card, a video card and all the built-ins on the motherboard plus a 500GB SATA hard drive. Do you think it's too much to ask of a 400W power supply to add a 120GB IDE drive and/or a 250GB SATA drive?

CALLING ALL ÜBERGEEKS!

I have a WD 250GB SATA hard drive (if I've lost you already, just skip this entry) that is starting to show signs of failing. To stave off the headaches associated with a hard drive crash, I purchased a Seagate 500GB SATA hard drive to use as my boot drive and expand my storage.

I had some challenges in getting the system to recognize the drive and get Windows to install but the short version is this: If I connect either of the drives individually, the system boots fine. If I connect both of them, setting the boot order to boot off the 500GB drive, the system bogs down and startup is very slow. When and if I get to the windows boot menu (I'm dual booting XP and Vista) I select which OS I want to load but it doesn't work. Usually it hangs at a black screen. Sometimes the mouse cursor is visible but won't move. I once left it to boot into Vista and got to the login screen but couldn't move the mouse or use the keyboard to select any options.

I bought a USB connector for the drive (think hard drive enclosure without the actual enclosure) and managed to pull all the data off the 250 with no problems. I have deleted all of the partitions and am back to a raw drive but that doesn't help. I thought there was some sort of software conflict but it appears to be a hardware conflict.

Any suggestions? My next step is to format or possibly zero out the drive. Do you think that will help?