Repairs
Retrofitting USB port on older APC BackUPS with RJ50
Before companies have standardized on USB, it was pretty common to find some strange connectors on equipment. Especially if they don’t want anyone to accidentally plug in the wrong thing. APC battery backups are a perfect example of using a RJ-50 plug to connect the USB signalling cable. To be fair, the RJ-50 plug with 10 [...]
Rattle Noise on 862D Solder Station
I’m really quite happy with the 862D+ soldering station, it heats quickly, user-controllable temperature, and overall good design. Except for my unit rattles. Oddly, only when it is under no load (when both soldering and hot air disabled). At first, I thought this was a fan inside that wasn’t well tightened. But to [...]
ATT U-Verse NVG589 and Amazon Fire won’t find Smartphone Remote
If you got a new Amazon Fire TV and want to use your smartphone as a remote through the Amazon Fire App, you will find that if you use the uverse router NVG589, your phone won’t find the Fire TV. Its because ATT’s router doesn’t support multicast (or UPNP or alot of other great and common wifi features). Which [...]
Laptop won’t start but power LEDs turn on
There is nothing more depressing with a laptop than opening it up, pressing the power key and having the LED status light and screen backlight turn on but nothing happen. CAUSES There is a wide gamut of causes of why a laptop won’t start up. With millions of transistors on its motherboard, the probability of them all working can [...]
Back/Forward on Microsoft Sculpt Comfort
To be honest, this mouse looks and feels great to use. The problem is some of its “features”. Back and Forward buttons This drove me crazy, out of the box, it has 4-way scrolling enabled. Meaning you can scroll left and right with the scroll wheel. I don’t know about you, but I rarely, if ever, have to scroll left [...]
Dual Bay NAS Test Run
If there is one thing to learn from working in IT, it is that technology doesn’t always work the way you plan. I recently upgraded a single drive 2TB Iomega NAS (network attached storage) with a dual bay Buffalo Linkstation NAS because I was concerned about the safety of the data being stored on it. When I first started [...]
Why your laptop overheats
Lets face it, you hear a lot of people say that brand x made a crappy laptop that overheats. But the truth of it is that Dell, Toshiba, and others aren’t so crappy that they have mass produced overheating laptops. They test them a lot in their labs and heat is a major concern to laptop designers. Truth is that we cause our laptop [...]