rebelpeon.com

Category: electronics

  • Good Time to be a Gamer

    As many people know, this week is E3.  This means, that all the soon to be released stuff gets previewed this week.  The most notable stuff that’s come out in the last few days is the Xbox 360, and the PS3.  Nintendo has released some stuff on the Revolution, but nothing to the extent of Microsoft and Sony.

    Needless to say these next gen consoles are going to rock.  Microsoft has finally realized what the original Xbox should’ve been (and actually almost is with xbmc).  Sony, has, at least on paper, produced a machine that seems unheard of with respect to hardware.

    Personally, I’m looking forward to the 360 more than the ps3.  Yeah, the ps3 seems to have the edge with hardware specs, but who knows if that will really mean anything, plus it’s coming out after the xbox.  The things I really am looking forward to the 360 are the multimedia hub aspect to it, because, frankly, that’s pretty much all I use my xbox for right now.  However, the dual HD outputs and the ability to have 7 wireless controllers on the ps3 entices me also.

    I guess it all comes back to the title…it’s a good time to be a gamer.

  • PIO Mode

    I bought a DVD burner recently, and that has been my primary burner in my new Dell machine.  However, just the other day, I realized it doesn’t have the ability to burn from cue files.  This, unfortunately, is a problem, since that’s how I backup all my CDs with flac.  Thankfully, my trusty old LiteOn 52x burner that I got for like $20 after rebate does. 

    So, I throw in the LiteOn in addition to the DVD burner, and start burning.  However, during the burn process my computer starts acting very slow.  Thankfully, I know that the problem is that the burner is in PIO Mode.  Usually, this is an easy fix; you just go into device manager, and then hit up the disk controller and change the pull down from PIO Mode Only to DMA Mode if Available under advanced settings.  I do this, restart, and STILL in PIO Mode.

    Now, I know that this LiteOn works in DMA mode, because that’s the way it used to be in my old machine.  So I check out google, and one of the first links I get to talks about enabling the drives in BIOS.  It also mentions seeing if there are events in the logs about it timing out in DMA mode.  Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case, so BIOS here we come.

    Now, this seems a bit odd.  I mean, if it’s not enabled in BIOS, how the hell can Windows even see the drive at all?  Well, I figure it’s worth a shot.  I head into BIOS, and sure enough it’s disabled.  I enable it, boot back into Windows, and low and behold, works like a charm.  This may also explain why the DVD burner was having such a hard time while the CDROM drive the machine came with was plugged in too.

    I guess you do learn something new every day.

  • Bluetooth and MPx220

    Well, I finally had the time and got around to setting up syncing my phone via Bluetooth and Activesync this evening.  Amazingly it wasn’t all that hard (contrary to many website posts I’ve seen about it).  Hell, I even bought a generic Bluetooth key off ebay. 

    So, now when I come home, I just have to tell the phone to sync, and then it’ll keep sync’ed while I stay around the house (I got the 100m bluetooth key, so I doubt I’ll be moving more than 300ft away from my main machine).  Granted, there’s still a few more things I want, like it actually syncing to the Exchange Server, instead of my desktop, but I figure that this is working well right now.  It’ll be fun to play with for awhile.

  • XBox Power Cable Revisited

    I actually received my replacement xbox power cable about 2 weeks ago, but I just haven’t gotten around to posting about it.  I have no idea what got into me, but I’ve been supremely lazy.  Anyways, the reason I even mention it, is because it came with a manual.  That’s right, a power cord with a manual.  What has the world come to?  I suppose I could be thankful, since I could’ve been sent the ginormous cord.

    Well, apparently, even the new power cords aren’t doing what they were initially planned to do.  Here’s a shocker, since the problem seems to be the actual solder jobs in the power supplies.  Not quite sure how a power cord could alleviate that problem, but then again, I’m no Microsoft engineer.

  • Cell Phone

    Anybody that’s trying to call my cell, don’t bother.  I just ordered an MPx220 from buy.com, and since I’m porting the number, my current phone is essentially dead.  When I attempt to place a call I get, essentially, the operator saying I need to supply a credit card, calling card, or I can place a collect call.  Honestly, I never knew that the cell phones would work that way.  I don’t know why they wouldn’t, but it never dawned on me.

    Good thing I don’t use my phone that much anyways.  Oh, and I’m donating my old phone to A Woman’s Place that a friend works at.

    **Update**
    Well, I have the new phone, and it and voicemail have been setup.  Now to just figure out all the bells and whistles with this thing.  Good lord, it has about eleventy billion more options than my old one.

  • Xbox Power Cable

    Apparantly there is a recall on Xbox Power adapters.  You can read all about it at news.com.  It seems to effect US consoles sold before Oct ‘03.  Go get yourself a new cord!

  • Sharepoint

    Michael brought up a great point the other day.  As he puts it, “there’s way to much shit i know.”  Now, granted, this usually isn’t that big of a problem.  However, it’s when you haven’t been using that knowledge and you want to attempt to remember it in a timely fashion, that things begin to breakdown.  Personally, I’d hate to think of all the stuff I have forgotten about just because I haven’t used them.  Well, now I may have a personal solution.  Windows Sharepoint Services.

    Hopefully this will help me clean out my bookmarks, since that’s where I have a tendency to keep all this stuff.  Usually, I have a problem, find the solution, and then have to redo all the previous steps when said problem comes up again.  It’d be nice if I had a personal place where I could just copy things into, and be able to edit them as I need to also. 

    Case in point, just today, my brother needed help with something, and I needed to do a remote assistance session with him.  Now, he’s behind a router that doesn’t support uPNP, so I had to manually edit the remote assistance file that he sent me.  Granted, I’ve had to do this before, but hell if I remembered.  So I had to waste a good 10-20 minutes figuring out why I was having such a hard time connecting to him (plus the fact he had xp home, which I didn’t remember, so I couldn’t just TS in). 

    Hopefully this will make everything better.  You can view my personal knowledge base at it’s new location.

  • Getting a Dell

    Today, until the 14th (I think), there is an awesome deal on Dell’s Dimension 4700.  For $499 (after $100 rebate), you get a 2.8GHz 800MHz FSB HT P4, 256MB DDR2 400MHz RAM, 40GB SATA Harddrive, 2 Year Warranty, FREE 17” LCD Monitor, and free shipping. 

    Just today, I was trying to transcode some Divx files to MPEG to burn to a DVD for my Mom (yes Mom, I’m still working on it), and I realized how dumb of an idea that was going to be on my tablet.  I started thinking that I needed to actually get a workstation for home, to do some of the things the tablet just isn’t very good at.  Of course, this deal just happened to start today, so, instead of getting a watch with my tax refund, I’ll be getting a new machine.  I did, however, upgrade the ram to 512MB and a 80GB harddrive.

    Hopefully I’ll have it soon so that I can give my Mom her bday gift.

  • Weekend Nerdiness

    On Friday I got a copy of Knights of the Old Republic 2 (KotOR2).  Needless to say, the weekend has been dominated with playing it.  Amazingly enough I still haven’t finished it yet.  For those of you that didn’t play the first one on either xbox or PC, go do yourself a favor and get it.  It’s by far one of the best game I’ve ever played.  Needless to say, KotOR2 is pretty much more of the same. 

    Now, I know that a lot of you are thinking, “What?  It’s just more of the same exact game?”  Well, in a nutshell, yes.  Granted there are a few improvements, but 95% of the game is exactly the same, just with a new/continuation of the story.  What’s really nice, is that they pretty much took everything that everyone wasn’t a fan of in the first one, or stuff they wanted, and put it into the second one.  The ability to have two weapons config set and ready to go, longer gameplay, dual-bladed light sabers, more weapons, etc. 

    What’s really creepy is that it seems as if it’s using my saved games from KotOR1 to fill in the story for this one.  I’m not sure if it really is or not though, because it’s been so long since I played it, but you go to some of the same planets in both, and it’s crazy because how the story has progressed.  If you haven’t played KotOR1 yet, you really should play it first before 2, just to appreciate the way the stories blend so well together. 

    I actually never beat the first one because I got to the end boss, and since I didn’t have light saber throw, I was practically impossible (I was light side).  Then I tried to beat it again on the harder level and didn’t even get to the end boss as the dark side.  So far, I haven’t had any problems with this one, so I’m imagining it’s going to be like the first.  At least in this type of game it makes sense.  I mean, at least in the last one, you were combating the strongest being in the universe.  I suppose I shouldn’t have just been able to roll over him, but it would’ve been way cooler.

    Now, I’m just hoping that they don’t have a max cap on the level of character you can have in the new one, because if it’s anywhere near where it was in the first one, I’m about done leveling up.

  • Incredibly Frustrating Part 2

    Well, I finally got around to trying out the Automatic Document Feeder for my scanner that HP shipped, and low and behold it works.  Well, not 100%, but it works.  The only problem now is that when it’s doing duplexing some documents get stuck half way through on the second pass.  Mildly frustrating, but not nearly as much as not having a functioning document feeder at all.  I wish I could praise Motion Computing the same though.

    If the University didn’t pay for this POS laptop, I would’ve sent it back months ago.  So, the problem is that my mouse “dances” in one of the corners.  It essentially gets stuck there, bouncing around and clicking till it’s heart is content.  The only way to get it out is to take out the pen and use it.  Now, granted, it’s annoying but at least you can still use the bloody thing.  That brings us to problem two; it mysteriously going into standby.  Yes, that’s right, I’m using it, not really doing anything intensive (writing this entry for example), and the machine decides it wants to go into standby. 

    Now, being the inquisitive and helpful person that I am, I’ve been troubleshooting these two problems on my own since they first started happening.  About 2 weeks after the dancing cursor started happening, I had concluded it was solely based on heat buildup in the laptop.  It was only occurring when it was in sunlight, I was holding it, or I was doing something very intensive like running VMWare.  I sent it back to them (on their buck) to see if they could fix it.  I get it back, still does it.  I then get a call about a month or so later from Motion asking if I was still experiencing the cursor problem.  They wanted to get as much info as possible since they weren’t sure exactly what the problem was since simply replacing the digitizer didn’t work.

    During this time, I thought I’d help them out and wipe my machine to start from scratch.  Well, that’s when the lovely standby problem started rearing it’s lovely head.  Granted, it wasn’t the first time it had happened (last time I wiped it, same problem), but I somehow got it to stop before.  Needless to say, this problem makes the laptop 100% useless.  I can’t even attempt to do anything without it shutting itself off.  I narrowed it down to the machine actually overclocking itself.  Who knows why, but at times the front side bus was running more than 33Mhz faster.  Being that there’s no fans in this tablet, that couldn’t have been good.  Well, I started up another RMA for that, but also mentioned that my cursor was still doing the same thing.  They said to send it back.  This time, they didn’t offer to pay for it.

    “The motherboard may need to be checked out, it maybe defective.  I suggest you send it in again.”

    So, of course I send it back in on the 19th.  I live without the tablet for half a week and then got it back on Monday.  Played with it a bit, and it seemed to be working fine.  Well, that didn’t last long.  Standby over and over.  It makes the workday so enjoyable.  So, I start back up the email conversation, continuing on from the previous one where they said they’d check out the motherboard.

    At first I just conveyed that it was still doing it again, but this time it seemed to be regardless of what I was actually doing on the machine.  After a day of no response, I received an email.

    An RMA has been issued to you so that you can send the unit in and have it fixed by a tech.  It sounds like an issue with the motherboard and needs to be checked by a tech.  I don’t think this problem can be fixed over email, please let me know if you still want to use this RMA to send the unit in.

    What the hell?  Why are they looking at the same problem that they apparently looked at last week.  It didn’t seem right to me, so I responded.

    I just sent it in 2 fridays ago, and just got it back on Monday from an rma (9949) on this exact same problem and I was told you were going to replace the motherboard.

    “>>Shane Farris
    >>The motherboard may need to be checked out, it maybe defective.  I
    >>suggest you send it in again.”

    Now I know that this laptop is indeed overclocking itself.  I used cpu-z (http://www.cpuid.com/cpuz.php) the fsb is more than 50% of the time >100Mhz (and therefore the quad-pumped bus speed is greater than 400Mhz).  In fact, using cpu-z I’ve seen bus speeds ranging from 250Mhz to 750Mhz!  These speeds were noted while Outlook, Trillian, and internet explorer were open with no intensive tasks running.

    Also, I just received a phone call that there is a permanent solution to the dancing cursor problem, which I also have.  It would be great if both of these problems could be fixed the next time I send it in.  Unfortunately, I have a presentation tomorrow afternoon in which I need the tablet, so I wouldn’t be able to get it out until afterwords.  It would also be nice if you guys would pick up the shipping to you this time, especially since it looks as if nothing was done last time I sent it in.

    And their non-helpful response was then beamed back to me.

    I’m sorry I thought you didn’t send the unit in yet.  Motion has found a solution to the erratic cursor problem and can fix that for you now.  I also told them to check out the motherboard issue and see why its over clocking the bus.  Please send the tablet back to the same address using RMA number MTC10518.  Thanks

    Once again, I was going to have to pay to send back this piece of crap laptop.  At least I’d be able to kill two birds with one stone.  Granted, I’d still have to send it back on my buck to pay for their mistakes.  Well, I figured I’d give them a call and see if I could get them to at least consider it.

    Before I called, I wanted to see what they actually did on my machine last week when I sent it back.  They at least have a website where you can type in the RMA number and see what they did. 

    Symptoms 1 (SS01)POINT DEVICE FAIL
    Root Cause 1 DEFECTIVE
    Part Used 1 DIGITIZER

    WTF?!  So, they replaced the digitizer, even though that wasn’t the main problem, plus they knew it would’ve fix it.  I’m starting to fume, I figured now would be the time to call.  Called, and of course I got Shane, who I’m assuming is the guy that I’ve been dealing with, since he starts all his emails with his name (don’t you usually start letters/emails with the other persons name?).  I asked him why they replaced the digitizer last week, even though that wasn’t really the problem I sent it in about, and that they knew it wouldn’t be fixed.  He sidestepped it well and mentioned that there was a fix for the digitizer problem.  Somehow they figured it was a heat problem, and by putting a cover over the hard drive, it would solve the problem.  I wanted to hang up right then.  I’d been telling them this for months, and they finally listened.  Well, I told him that I do want that fixed, but that is not the most urgent problem, the one where my computer randomly goes to sleep is.  He said that they’d have to replace the motherboard, and I asked, “Like they were supposed to do last time?” 

    Well, finally I said that there’s no way I’m paying to send it in, since I paid last time and they didn’t fix anything.  I also informed him that they previously paid for me to send it in, the first time, when I thought they were a decent company.  He said that he could get me labels, but would have to have his manager/supervisor do it, since I would need them for tomorrow, not today. 

    Hopefully my machine does restart too many times while I’m trying to be professional and doing a presentation on and Exchange Migration.  For some reason, I’m not holding my breath.