Danny's Weblog

My laptop woes abate

My Atec laptop has had various problems, although it's never needed an expensive repair.

Recently it started shutting down very rapidly, amid apparently bogus "low-battery" warnings. In fear and trembling, I disassembled it. I was expecting to find the fan compartment was clogged with dust, but it was almost clean. However, there was almost no heatsink compound detectable and what was visible had hardened. I figured this matched up with the fact that the case of the machine got red-hot but the exhaust air was scarcely warm, so I went looking for heatsink compound.

I had assumed this would be available because there are a ton of places that assemble PCs, but I had no luck. Eventually a tech at PTC on Monivong took pity on me and gave me a little hypodermic for free (hmmm... I wonder if he filled it with toothpaste... nah...).

I opened up the laptop again and reassembled it with the heatsink compound. (I have at least a dozen screws left over – no joke.)

Then I didn't get the fast bogus low-battery shutdowns; now I was getting *instantaneous* shutdowns.

I figured that when I reassembled the case I had left something loose enough that a slight flexing could short out the power supply. I experimented with using an external mouse and keybd, and that worked very well.

After a while I tried running without the external devices, and the laptop *still* worked. Then it occurred to me that the period when I suffered the instananeous shutdowns was exceptionally cold and dry, with nighttime temperatures going as low as 70 F; and right around the start of the problem I had actually felt a static zap in an air-conditioned store. Hmmm! I guess what I had actually done was loosened one of the earthing straps which, when you open up a laptop, you can always see were added in desperation at the last moment before the ship date, and get in your way until the tacked-on solder joint snaps. Static zap: foom. I guess I was lucky it just reset the machine rather than burning something out.

Anyhow, now it seems to be working fine... touch wood. I'm hoping the earthing wire got jiggled back in place; but it's probably just hot and humid now.

Small, low-power servers -- hardware ideas

A Slashdot discussion had a lot of ideas on what hardware to use to set up a small, low-power server in the home: ask.slashdot.org [http://ask.slashdot.org/askslashdot/04/09/17/2221248.shtml]

A lot of respondents suggested using an old laptop, possibly with a dead battery or display.

Some links:

Soekris mini PCs: www.soekris.com [http://www.soekris.com/]

I took a look and they have several other interesting products: in particular a 4-port Ethernet card for PCI, and a low-profile Ethernet card with *two ports*. BSD, Linux and Windows drivers. www.soekris.com [http://www.soekris.com/lan16x1.htm]

Soekris also has a tenny-weeny 486-CPU board with a PCI slot that you can use with those Ethernet cards. It also has a serial port, compact flash, PXE and support for headless operation (using serial port). Price: 159 USD, board only qty 1: www.soekris.com [http://www.soekris.com/net4501.htm]

Pebble Linux (distro for WAN servers on eg Soekris): www.nycwireless.net [http://www.nycwireless.net/pebble/]

Soekris tutorial: www.davidcourtney.org [http://www.davidcourtney.org/soekris.html]

Mini-box ITX motherboard-compatilbe boxes; www.mini-box.com [http://www.mini-box.com/products.htm]

Mini-itx motherboards: www.mini-itx.com [http://www.mini-itx.com/]

Openbrick.org (small diskless PCs): openbrick.org [http://openbrick.org/]

Good short article on how much power regular PCs and monitors actually take (short answer: 80W during defragging; 60 W in use): www.techreviewer.com [http://www.techreviewer.com/viewpage.cfm/pi/29]

How to boot your PC off a USB disk

I haven't tried this stuff yet, but here are some links.

Slashdot discussion: ask.slashdot.org [http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/02/06/2252202]

which linked to a long posting in a forum that looks promising (booting Linux and W98): forums.gentoo.org [http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=78454]

I also found the homepage for "smart boot manager", an entirely free piece of software from Sourceforge. It doesn't sem to have USB features particularly, but it looks like if you can make a USB key boot at all, you can put "smart boot manager" on it and allow it to boot to multiple operating systems. btmgr.sourceforge.net [http://btmgr.sourceforge.net/]

I still haven't found any description of how to check whether your PC, BIOS or USB key actually supports booting. There were several postings that said they'd tried umpteen things to make one combination work but another combination worked first time.

Who really made your laptop?

Almost all laptops are really made by a few Taiwanese manufacturers. The Atec brand in Thailand, for instance, is really reselling various Twinhead models.

I tried searching on these manufacturer names:

Twinhead

Quanta Computer

Compal Electronics

and found many interesting pages. This is a good overview: www.absolutelaptops.com [http://www.absolutelaptops.com/madebywho.asp]

and this at first drab-looking page links to various pages which allow you to search for your manufacturer by FCC ID or BIOS id: www.quest.co.nz [http://www.quest.co.nz/services/who.htm

The three common PC case screws described

Here's a link to an OK guide to the common screws:

www.bunkermentality.net [http://www.bunkermentality.net/sg03.html]

The link I give is the last (answers) page of a three-page quiz; I thought I'd spare you the "quiz" aspect.

There was a Slashdot discussion about it that was mildly interesting:

slashdot.org [http://slashdot.org/articles/04/02/03/012247.shtml]

Personally, I don't think the guy gave a very comprehensive view. For instance, he doesn't refer to the widely-available plastic case screws intended to allow toolfree access.

Likewise, he doesn't give a good source for obtaining these screws. I've often seen miniscule packs on sale in real computer shops for several dollars.

Additionally, I have run into quite a few cases (heh) where slightly – frustratingly – different screws were used for the case and the card slots. In fact, I vaguely think that was the original standard.

The issue of clearance might have been addressed more. I have run into a lot of instances where I had screws which had the right thread but the head obstructed something. A lot of drive screws these days have an extremely flat profile for this reason, which was not shown in the images used for the quiz.

His general points about how the ludicrous proliferation of similar but non-interchangeable screws has blighted the lives of PC techs for 20 years were good.

Small and/or cheap PCs

Here's a slashdot discussion on small motherboards that mentions several other interesting options: ask.slashdot.org [http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/08/12/2058258

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