unsharpTech » Hardware

Fix a malfunctioning BlackBerry Trackball [video]

sam — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 05:51:26 +0000

A friend of mine had a couple Bolds with trackball issues, we went as far as taking one of them apart and attempting to clean the trackball mechanism with no luck. I finally came across this method on a forum and we were amazed by the results – so amazed that we recorded the process on the second Bold with an HD Flip.

HP Service is Scared of a little Bug

sam — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 22:59:39 +0000

After spending 6+ hours on the phone with HP Technical Support (not an exaggeration) attempting to convince them that the issue with our customer’s HP Slimline was in fact hardware related and not a configuration problem (that’s another story), they finally agreed to replace the motherboard under warranty. When we got the computer back and read the service report we were less than pleased…

Click for full view of HP Refusal Letter

Ok ok, so I could understand if there was a big nasty cockroach sprawled on the motherboard, I would be pretty grossed out too… but I would still pick it up (maybe with some gloves), throw it in the trash, and do the warranty work on the computer – because, after all, that’s why we sent it to HP in the first place.

Anyway, this is the menace that kept HP from their work:

Click for full view

So, this guy was so small we didn’t even see him before we sent it off, and even after we got it back we had trouble locating him. After a thorough search we couldn’t find any of his friends, in fact, except for the dead passenger, the case was pretty darn clean.

To clarify, there was one very small bug in this computer, which was enough for HP Service to refuse to replace the motherboard under warranty.

And after removing the offending creature, calling HP Support, explaining the situation, going through over-phone-diagnostics for the fourth time, and generally wasting our day, the HP Support technician informed my boss that according to his documentation, the warranty for this computer was completely VOID due to INSECT INFESTATION.

Because of one small dead insect ( < 1/4″ x 1/4″ x 1/4″ ) the warranty for this HP Pavilion desktop computer was completely void. After many days of 2+ hour long phone calls, a week for the RMA box to show, another week for the computer to be returned, and another 2 hours on the phone, we finally receive conclusive evidence that HP just doesn’t give a shit.

Atheros Wireless in Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex

sam — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 17:38:55 +0000

Did a fresh install + updates of Kubuntu 8.10 on a customer’s laptop and had no wireless even though it’s an Atheros chipset.

UPDATE:

I recently tried this method on a similar Acer laptop with Ubuntu 8.10 AMD64 with no results. After searching, I used another guide that makes compiling madwifi from source simple. If my method doesn’t work for you, remove the backports modules:
sudo apt-get remove linux-backports-modules-intrepid-generic
then reboot, and try out the below guide. Thank you Hyperandy.

Link: http://blog.hyperandy.com/2008/11/01/atheros-ar242x-ubuntu-810-ibex/

Hardware:

Laptop: Acer Aspire 4520
Wireless Card: Atheros AR242x Communications Inc. 802.11abg

lspci | grep "Atheros"
07:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR242x 802.11abg Wireless PCI Express Adapter (rev 01)

Resolution:

sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-intrepid-generic

After above install completes, reboot, then open up the Hardware Drivers manager (jockey-gtk or jockey-kde) and disable “Support for Atheros 802.11 wireless LAN cards” and make sure that “Support for 5xxx series of Atheros 802.11 wireless LAN cards” is enabled then reboot. You may need to reboot to see both drivers in the Hardware Drivers manager.

This is at least a temporary fix, you’ll end up with the ath5k drivers- hopefully a stable universal method for Atheros card support will become available soon.

Source:
8.10 Release Notes | Ubuntu

Using SIW to Find Hardware in Windows

sam — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 05:55:41 +0000

I’ve often resorted to loading up a Linux livecd and running “lspci” just to get an idea of what hardware is in a box. Let’s face it, even if box manufacturers do provide the drivers you need, that model may have shipped with one of 4 different NICs, video cards, etc. So it used to be I had to run a linux cd and the lspci command to get the PCI devices table but not anymore…

I thought SIW (System Information for Windows) was a nifty tool from the beginning, it replaced CPU-Z for RAM and Mobo information and since discovering the PCI listing, getting appropriate drivers has become much easier. Now don’t think just cause it’s under PCI that only PCI related devices are there, pretty much every relevant device is in there including VGA controllers, Bluetooth adapters, SATA Controllers, and more.

Anyway, all you gotta do is get siw.exe from gtopala.com, run it and go down to the Hardware tree, then click PCI. You can also click on the Hardware menu up top then PCI or hit File, then Create Report File to get it to go.

Don’t forget, SIW also has a Password Revealer (Tools -> Eureka!), a MAC Address Changer (Tools -> Mac Address Changer), a Licenses List (Software -> Licenses), and much more fun.

Praise for eeeXubuntu

sam — Wed, 21 May 2008 01:42:35 +0000

So when I first got my Black Asus Eee PC 4G xmas ’07 I pretty much freaked out about all the possibilities but ended up installing my distro of choice, Arch Linux and all the Eee specific hardware support, then it kinda sat… and sat, until. I recently decided to review the current OS choices available for the Eee and settled on eeeXubuntu as the best candidate – clean little Ubuntu based with Eee hardware support out of the box. Besides, I just wanted to use my Eee not fiddle with the thing (I had my fill a few months ago, it was fun though).

I downloaded the Live CD .iso and booted it in VMware Server on an XP host, then plugged in a 1GB Corsair Voyager USB drive and enabled it for the VM so the Live CD virtual machine would have access. From there I just followed the guide on the eeeuser.com wiki and ran the USB drive install script, booted off the USB stick on the Eee and BAM! this s**t was fast! I was super impressed, I mean Arch is a KISS fast distro but eeeXubuntu destroyed my Arch install by comparison.

Anyways, after playing on the USB stick live OS for a while I opted to install, one partition at ‘/’ (no swap) and MurderFS... I mean ReiserFS. The current eeeXubuntu Live CD is based on Xubuntu 7.10 while the current version of Xubuntu is Hardy Heron 8.04 LTS but I think there’s a guide on the eeeuser Wiki to run the upgrade manager to get to 8.04.. I’m cool with 7.10 for now though.

Wireless worked with NetworkManager Applet OUT OF THE BOX, thank god. I followed the guide (again on the eeeuser.com Wiki) to install ucview to have some fun w/ the webcam (cheese was giving me some issues I couldn’t resolve).

DUDE, this thing flies! General responsiveness is awesome by my standards, and I’ve run all major operating systems on a huge range of hardware with all sorts of configs (let’s not get into that). I can even freakin’ watch the bigger Flash vids that straight up refused to work on my Arch install. Don’t think I’m bashing Arch, heck no, I like to think I have a darn good understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of Ubuntu based distros vs. Arch Linux and bottom line is I believe that eeeXubuntu is just a super well-put-together distro for the Eee. Color me impressed. But maybe Ubuntu or Debian in general is better suited to the Eee platform?.. I don’t care cause I’m more than happy with eeeXubuntu.

Gripes? out of the box it likes to complain about my battery capacity there’s a bit in the eeeuser.com Wiki about setting up ACPI correctly – I’ll fix it soon / when I get pissed. Whatever, this is sweet.

I had to release my excitement so I spewed this out, comments welcome.
eeeuser.com Wiki eeeXubuntu Home

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