Mr. Melty…
May 15, 2012 | 
Author To all my wonderful friends and customers out there, please do NOT ever do this.
Brought into our support center yesterday. The owner (who shall remain nameless) decided putting it into the oven was the most efficient way of drying it after he’d spilled water on it. This was a college student… I weep for the future. Amazingly the hard drive was unaffected
The keys were like Shrinky-Dinks. The user wasn’t willing/able to say how long they’d left it in the oven and at what temp.
Thankfully he’d remembered to remove the battery. Amazingly the hard drive spun up from a dock no problem.
The source of this tragedy can be found HERE. Please, never attempt to dry your computer or any electronics in an oven. For one, it’s very dangerous, and two, your oven will never smell right again…
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Laptop for sale! – ASUS K50I – SOLD!
Recently repaired laptop for sale! This sweet little machine is by one of my favorite manufacturers, ASUS Tek. These guys have built the best motherboards for almost two decades and they build incredible computers as well. They introduced the netbook computer (those little machines that aren’t good for much more than surfing the net, but they have batteries that last for almost a full day) and pack as much performance into each machine as they can for the best price. This machine is a nice widescreen 15.6″ with a dual core Pentium processor, 3GB of RAM and a 320GB hard drive. It’s in great shape and just had the screen replaced and hard drive reset to factory. You can’t go wrong with ASUS quality. If anyone is interested I’m asking $260.
Here’s the LeJeuneYardSales.com link: http://www.lejeuneyardsales.com/item26951032.html?itemId=26951032
Resurrected from the dead…
Recently some friends and I went through a bunch of old laptops I had shoved in boxes and corners around the house. We came across a few machines that looked promising to repair and man did we stumble into some luck. I’ve got one ASUS that I need to buy a screen for, but otherwise it’s in great shape. Another was an older Toshiba that wasn’t getting power. The last was a Thinkpad T61 that wouldn’t power on, just beeped at me in its cryptic language. There are more laptops still for me to go through, but these were the three we settled on.
The ASUS doesn’t have much of a story since it’s a simple screen replacement so we’ll start with the Toshiba. The machine showed no signs of life so I handed it off to our young learner, Stephen. We showed him how to take it apart, keep track of the screws and where they go and what he was looking at on the insides of this laptop. This is the first time, Stephen has disassembled a computer so it was a great learning experience for him. I told him ahead of time that if he fixed it, he could keep it. Well low and behold the basic troubleshooting skills we taught him narrowed the problem down to a bad power cable/jack assembly inside the machine. We cut the old jack off and soldered on one I had lying around from a long since gone Dell. This worked out well since the Toshiba didn’t have a power supply and the Dell power supply I had left over was the perfect voltage and amperage for it. Stephen reassembled his laptop and fired it up to find the hard drive of course needed an operating system. He quickly loaded a copy of Windows 7 and went happily on his way with a nice laptop for poking around the internet and doing school work on. Congratulations Stephen!
The last laptop in our trio is a decent little Lenovo (IBM) Thinkpad T61. When powered on the machine gives off a pattern of beeps (don’t ask me the pattern I wasn’t paying attention). Thankfully someone was paying attention and looked up the code to find out it was complaining about a graphics adapter failing to initialize. This would normally indicate the need for a new motherboard as the graphics are integrated on newer machines. Google to the rescue! I was able to find some reports of people having luck reflowing the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) on these laptops so I figured I didn’t really have anything to lose right? Well I tore it down and laid out my foil to protect the rest of the motherboard from the rework gun. Setting the temperature on the gun appropriately (I’ll not tell you how high because people would think I’m insane) I went to work slowly heating the chip and ensuring the soldering pads on the top were liquid. After getting a good heat soak in I let it cool with a large padlock on top of the chip. The padlock probably isn’t necessary, but I figure the weight could help keep the chip settled while the solder solidifies again. After a brief reassembly (ok fine, for once I had to find the manual, these Lenovo’s have a lot of different types of screws!) I plugged it in and hit the power button. After a few seconds I was starting to think all was lost when I was suddenly greeted with the Thinkpad BIOS logo. IT WORKED! I forgot how slow Thinkpads are to load initially, but I’m grateful that this one did. They’re really great machines and I’m glad to see one come back from the dead. The more old computers we can give new life to the better.
For those of you wondering why I’m posting all of this on my business blog, well, I don’t have a personal blog so this is it for me. Also it goes to show you that when I don’t have your computer on the bench I’m still honing my skills and learning something new for the next one. I really need to post more on my blog anyway, so enjoy!
Email hijacking, a true story.
Recently my wife, Allissa, informed me that my Yahoo email account must have been hacked. She was receiving emails from that address with spam in them. Hmmm, I think I should look into this one a bit. Upon checking my account activity and verifying that I was not a victim of foul play (pop3 and smtp access is disabled and there are no unusual emails in my sent, deleted or otherwise folders) I decided to look a bit more closely at the emails she had received.
The great thing about email is that it can be tracked. By looking at the header details of a message you can tell with some certainty where an email came from. These particular messages were not originating from a yahoo mail server as one would suspect. In true Hotmail fashion our perpetrator was using Hotmail and somehow had acquired Allissa’s contacts list. This enabled the spammer to fake addresses she would be familiar with to ensure she would open the mail and hopefully take the bait inside.
Promptly she changed her email password to hopefully thwart further attacks. If anyone out there has recently received unusual emails from Allissa, I can reasonably assure you it wasn’t her (although there are THOSE days…). So far she hasn’t had any further issues.
So the moral of this story is, just because it says it’s from a particular address, doesn’t necessarily mean it is. Email header information can be pulled up in just about any email program. Some are a bit more cryptic about finding it, others it’s very obvious. Typically you can Google the information (i.e. Hotmail open header details). If you still can’t figure it out, hit me up and I’ll see what I can do to help. I think I’ve had email with just about every service provider around since the early 90’s.
EDIT: For further information on how to read email headers, The How to Geek has a great article on this! Click Here to check it out.
Forum and main site working again.
If anyone has recently attempted to register on the site or on the forum and never received an email for their password, I do apologize. The issue has been resolved and everything is working as it should. So please come back check us out again! If you have any issues let me know!
As power gets restored to the surrounding areas…
Keep in mind that you should make sure all computers and electronics are unplugged from the outlets. When the power comes back on it can surge high and sometimes drop low as appliances and large electronics turn back on. These surges can cause serious damage to computers and other sensitive equipment. Don’t expect your surge protector to stop everything. Although they can minimize the amount of over voltage surge to an extent, they have no way to compensate for a low voltage surge which can be just as damaging. Hopefully you will get this message from mobile devices before your computers come back online. Be safe and let me know if you need any support.
August Clean Up Special!
For the entire month of August I’ll be doing a System Clean Up Promotion. Core PC Solutions standard cleanup fee of $60 is reduced to $40 for the rest of this month! Feel like your computer is running a bit slow? Think you might have a virus? Just want to see how much more we can tweak out of your machine? Give us call or send us an email and we’ll setup a time and day to pick up your machine for a full service clean up!
Note: A full service clean up can take anywhere from 24 to 72 hours depending on the level of cleaning required. Please make arrangements if necessary to be without a computer for at least 72 hours. If extra time is required you will be contacted before the 72 hours is up. As always feel free to contact Core PC Solutions to check in on your machine and see how things are going anytime!
Welcome to the world Julian Christian Buseman!
On July 24th, 2011 at 1651 we welcomed into the world Julian Christian Buseman. He weighed in at 7lbs 5oz and 19.25 inches long. To see more photos check out my Facebook photo album.
How to (possibly) track your laptop if it’s stolen.
Laptops are one of the greatest inventions in the last 40 years. They make most things easier and greatly improve the portability of your work load. The downside of all this portability is that it makes things much easier to steal. So what happens when your laptop is stolen? All your information, pictures, work, passwords, everything, gone with the wind. So how can you possibly keep this from happening? Although there’s no way to completely guarantee your information is safe and that your computer can be tracked if it’s stolen, there’s a good chance that by doing these three things, you have a much better chance.
First and foremost, lets protect your most sensitive information. There’s a free program called TrueCrypt that will allow you to create encrypted containers of various types. You can even encrypt your entire hard drive. Although that would protect your information from being read, it would destroy everything we want to do. When a thief steals something and realizes he can’t use it, i.e. can’t boot the computer because it’s encrypted, he will either ditch it as quickly as possible to make some small coin from it, or just wipe it out and reinstall windows destroying all your information and making it near impossible to find your computer again. You want to create a small container big enough to store the information you want, but small enough not to draw immediate attention from someone who might be looking. TrueCrypt has a great Beginner’s Tutorial you should check out to get more details on how to use it.
Second in our list is installing software for tracking your laptop. There’s an open source project called the Prey Project that does just that. Being open source it’s not only free, but it also has a great community for support in the off chance you have an issue. There’s even a Prey Pro that offers more services and features you can use to track your computers, phones and other devices, for a fee (gotta support that free version somehow). Other options for tracking your computer are available, just search google, they’re everywhere. In the event you don’t like this option (not sure why) you could also use some of the free for personal use remote software packages. Companies like Teamviewer and LogMeIn offer such options. Although these won’t allow you to track your laptop, you can see when it comes online, maybe get an IP address that can be used to track it or turn on the webcam and get good look at your thief. Whatever choice you make just ensure you know how to use the programs fully so that if your machine goes missing, you don’t have to suddenly learn and lose time you could be using to get your machine back.
Third in our list is both securing your account and unsecuring your computer. Makes sense right? Let me explain. Just like with the encryption, we don’t want your computer to be unusable, but we also don’t want your information accessible. So password protect your account to fend off the thief (keep in mind a smart thief can still get in, I can crack any windows account password in less than 5 minutes), and create a second account without a password for him to use. Yes that’s right, give your thief an account to use. We want him to use the computer, because if he doesn’t we have nothing to track. Your computer has to be running with all your programs intact for us to find it.
Well that’s that, if these methods don’t help then you’ve got a pretty smart thief on your hands (as smart as someone who finds no qualms with stealing can be anyhow). In the end though the idea is to not get your computer stolen in the first place, but sometimes there’s just nothing you can do about it. So it’s up to you to prepare for the chance it happens and better your chances at getting it back. If you enjoyed this post, found it useful or have any comments on the subject please let me know! Leave me a comment or send me a message.
Liliputing article!
I’m one of those people that doesn’t see any significance in the work I do. I honestly feel like it’s pretty basic stuff and I’m just standing on the shoulders of others when people tout that my work is something other than average. However when someone writes an article outlining something I’ve done, it makes me feel pretty proud of my work and most of all thankful of the gifts God has given me. Well, today is one of those days when I get a bit of recognition for the blessings God gave me. A well known blogging/news site for “Compact Computing” called Liliputing has recognized the BIOS hack I posted about last night and written an article on it. The article can be found HERE.
- Old shelf radio, working or not [Neg.]I'm looking for an old shelf or desktop radio shell. I don't need a working piece as I really just want to convert it to a computer case for my Home Theater PC. That's just a heads up that it won't be restored to a fully working antique radio, it will be gutted and used as a shell for a computer. Message me and let me know what you'v […]
- Crystal Coast Linux Users Group (LUG) []If you are a Linux user, no matter the skill level, we would like to hear from you! I'm trying to put together a local LUG (Linux Users Group) for people in the area to get together and share experiences, information and general expertise in Linux and computing in general. Check out the Core PC Solutions web forum to discuss the details: http://corepcso […]