Dell Laptop RAM Fails. Dell Service Saves The Day

Last night my laptop froze while I was moving data from the hard drive to a usb memory stick.  Nothing was working, I had to turn off the computer by pressing on the power switch until the computer turned off.  I restarted the computer and I was getting noting except the power indicator light, the DVD drive light and the caps lock light were on.  It was late so I did not fool around with it too much.

I am presently on vacation and staying at my mothers house on the river.  There is no internet at my mom’s so I could not research what was happening to my laptop (Dell vostro 1500).  This morning I decided to drive to my apartment in “the city” and try to figure out what was going on.  I was not even getting the Dell splash screen nothing was happening with the computer.  I read a bunch of forums to see if anybody had any idea what was going on.  I read that it was the RAM, I read it was the hard drive, I read that it was the CPU, I read that it was the motherboard, …etc.

I check on Dell’s Canadian site to see if I was still under warranty and thank goodness I still have 26 days of warranty on my laptop.  Worse case scenario I send the vostro to Dell and they fix, I might lose a bit of data.  I call the tole free number to see if they can help me out before I send in the computer.  I try a lot of things, after a half hour on the phone we figured out that the problem lies with the RAM failing.  They are upgrading their system at Dell so it takes another 30 minutes before the tech confirms that they’ll ship out a replacement for my faulty RAM.  I am glad that I can fix this myself and that I will not lose any of the data on my computer.

Last year when I ordered my Dell laptop, Ubuntu pre-installed was not available in Canada.  I got my computer with Windows XP and when I got it I installed Ubuntu right away.  These days a Canadian consumer can get three systems from Dell With Ubuntu pre-installed.  I own two Dell computers and with both  I had a small problem with each one and when I called the support line they were able to help me out so I will recommend Dell to anybody that is looking for a great computer with Ubuntu as its operating system.  It’s all about the service.  We all hear about bad service it is time that we hear about good service.

Solving eeePC Fan Noise Confirmed

I did the Ubuntu updates on my eeePC this morning knowing that I would have to recompile madwifi yet again, since there was an update to the kernel. I did not realise that I would have another small problem.

After compiling madwifi I restart the eeePC and the fan noise is back again, damn, damn, damn!  Will the fix that I wrote about in this post work?  I hope so.  I am already late for work, I have to wait until the end of the day to confirm or debunk that if you turn off the eeePC, unplug the power cord and remove battery and install battery solves the loud fan noise.

This is the first thing I do when get home from work and I am glad to tell you that it works.  I turn on the eeePC before attempting the fix to see hear if the fan is loud, it is.  When I start the netbook after installing the battery again The fan cannot be heard.

Glad To Be Invited To The Party

I am very happy that my little blog is now aggregated on Planet Ubuntu Users.  I am sad that my first post is about getting rid of Kubuntu in favour of openSUSE.  I was pissed off at Kubuntu at the time of writing that post, now that I have calmed down I may change my mind.

I had tried to get on PUU a month ago or so but was not accepted because I had sent a picture of the back of my head instead of a proper hackergotchi.  I was to lazy busy to create one, so yesterday I finally decided to do it and try again.  I am glad that I did. There are lots of how-to’s on the ‘net you can follow that can help you if you don’t know what to do, I used Nicu’s How-to as a guide.  I was going to write a how-to on using gimp but there are so many of them already I decided against it.

While I was looking for a picture of myself to change into a hackergotchi, I decided to change two of my computers desktop backgrounds.  The first one is “kramer”, my laptop.

The second one is “babu”, my eeePC.

I’ll leave you with that.  The next post should have more substance.

Goodbye Kubuntu, Hello OpenSUSE

I removed Kubuntu 8.04 KDE 4 remix and installed openSUSE with KDE 4.  My first impression was:  Wow this looks great.  OpenSUSE looks very polished compared with Kubuntu.  Everything works as it should,  I am impressed.  I have been using it for a few days and I was thinking off going back to Kubuntu because I know it better and can get things done faster with it until today.  On my Kubuntu box with KDE 3.5.8 I can’t get my Kafeine player to do anything.  This bug only affects Kubuntu, why?  I tried every fix I could find on the net, nothing works.  OpenSUSE works, why not Kubuntu?

I decided to keep openSUSE 11 KDE 4 on one box, Ubuntu on the laptop, Ubuntu on the eeePC and on the last box I’ll be getting rid of Kubuntu 3.5.9 and going with something else.  I am debating between GoblinX and Elive.  Both of them have new releases this week and I have been waiting for both of them to try them out.  One of them will be left on a computer for longer than a few days, I don’t know which one yet but I will find out pretty soon.

I really like Ubuntu they have a fine product but I cannot use Kubuntu anymore or until Canonical decides to put more resources towards it.