Andy’s Technotes and commentary

I purchased a battery for a Dell Inspiron 6000 from eBay seller WebExpress4u.
When installed into the Dell I got:

“Warning: The battery cannot be identified. The system will be unable to charge this battery. Press any key to continue.”

And true to the warning the battery would not charge.
I searched for a solution on the internet and flashed the BIOS to the latest rev and the problem remained.
I emailed the seller and got a form letter response about RMA-ing the battery back.l.
I sent the battery back and got a UPS delivery confirmation on 8/10/09.
After three weeks I emailed the seller. They claimed they had never received the battery.
Within a day or two they found the battery and sent me a new one that had the exact same problem on two different Inspiron 6000.
My best guess is the Dell BIOS checks the battery for authenticity and refuses to charge a non-Dell battery.
I asked the seller for a refund and got it within a couple days.
I am out the $7 to ship back to the seller but at least they have not asked me to return the unusable battery at my expense.

At least the seller did not require me to return the second incompatible batter, not that I would have anyway.

Tried Windows7 32 bit clean install on this notebook.
Loads and runs but device manager reports driver errors on Coprocessor and two “Base Devices”. The base devices are the card reader and the error goes away when you install the Vista card reader drivers from HP.
No chipset drivers available from HP or Nvidia for this model.
Tried HP Vista Nvidia graphics driver in “compatibility mode”. Installed but did no fix the error.
Coprocessor error is intractable.
Upgraded BIOS did not help

HP+Nvidia=crappy lappy in oh so many ways!

Does anyone offer an explanation of the sudden @50% increase in the price of DVD burners?
Drive and brand selection is very limited now also.
Any connection to the Muslim racial violence in Urumqi, capital Xinjiang in western China?
LCD monitor prices have edged up since the beginning of the violence.

/

Symptom: user installed Mcafee on Vista Home. Internet connectivity lost. LAN and router ping OK. Tried opendns as static DNS server. Can PING OPENDNS by IP address.

Fix: from command line as administrator:

NETSH WINSOCK RESET

Reboot.

Problem solved.

This article suggests that the major free AV software (AVG, Antivir, Avast and even the lowly much maligned free Microsoft Windows Defender) correctly detected the latest (12/11/2008) zero day virus. Mcaffe, Norton and ESET Nod32 missed it!

http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/security/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=212400523&subSection=Vulnerabilities+and+threats

Autorun.inf virus infected the International Space Shuttle and the US DOD.
Protect yourself.

Regedit.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, SOFTWARE
Microsoft
Windows NT
CurrentVersion
Right-click on “IniFileMapping”
choose “New”/”Key”.
Name the new key “Autorun.inf”.
“IniFileMapping”
“Autorun.inf”
Double-click “(Default)”
(in the right-hand pane) and enter “@SYS:DoesNotExist”

per http://nick.brown.free.fr/blog/2007/10/memory-stick-worms

Thanks Nick!

How can you trust computer to a company that makes a heat sink and fan that is as awful as the stock fan included with retail boxed Intel socket 775 processors?
One flex of the motherboard (like when inserting a video card) or a jar of the computer and the heat sink comes loose. Awful.

We found a site that infects visitors computers with the nasty Antivirus 2009 fake antivirus virus. We checked it against the Mcafee Site Advisor. Despite 4 user posts warning about this site, the “Advisor” had still not gotten around to checking it.
Google has not flagged it either.

System: HP M7480n.
Symptom: User can power on for a few seconds and the computer shuts itself off.
Problem: diagnosed and replaced power supply.
Visual inspection showed defective capacitor on AT X1600 video card. Replaced with ASUS 3450 ATI PCIe.
Catalyst Control Center  software bundled with the new card requires .NET 2.0
All attempts to install .NET 2.0 failed, both in Windows Update and the using MSI redistributable.
I tried to research the problem in general by Google searchin .NET 2.0 install problems.
Aaron Stebner’s Web Log appears to be a good source for technical information about .NET.
I ran Aaron’s .Net Setup Verifier and it looked like .NET 1.1 was ok but 2.0 had partially installed.
The MSI redistributable produces better error messages so  I looked at the System Event log and found a 25015 error which I cut and pasted into Google.
This lead me to the  dotnetfx_cleanup_tool.exe which appeared to hang itself prior to completion.
I looked at the Task Manager and it saw SPYSWEEPER was causing the system to hang even though SpySweeper had been disabled through the UI.
I waiteded it out and eventually the cleanup tool finished successfully and cleaned out all the .NET installs.
Upon reboot I was able to install .NET.

There is a strong case to be made for uninstalling all the SpySweepers, Spyware Doctors, Zone Alarms and  Internet Security Suites and even antivirus software when chasing down software problems. Even though the UI for these products says they are disabled….they arent. They impede the software troubleshooting process. One could even make the case that these security softwares cause as many problems as they prevent.

Morgan Webb’s great “Webbalert” newscast is down to about 3 days a week.
This show is a gem but it can’t become a daily habit for viewers if the production schedule is so irregular.
I am disappointed when I sit down in front of the computer in the morning with my daily bowl of grub clusters and there is no new WebbAlert.
A smart sponsor should get in on the ground floor of this show.