Desolé
My laptop is on the fritz, so there will be no further updates from Strings 2007. Which is a pity, because there have been some very cool talks since my last posting.
Update (7/04/2007):
Thanks to those who speculated on the nature of my laptop’s ailment. On Friday evening,
Kelly Stelle came to my rescue, equipped with an iPod
1 with a copy of MacOSX on it, a variety of cables and connectors, and a Swiss Army knife. We tried everything to resuscitate the machine. Nothing worked, until we opened it up and removed the 1GB
RAM module. It then booted just fine, with the 128MB of
RAM on the motherboard. Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do with 128MB of
RAM. So a real fix had to wait until my return. I flew back on Monday, arriving home at 2 am on Tuesday. At 1 pm, the new memory module arrived, I installed it, and my machine was happy again.
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Re: Desolé
Hard disc drive problems, maybe? That seems to be the main mechanical failure cause for laptops. If it is the problem, it’s usually accompanied by a clicking sound or a slowing of boot-up. Just back up the HDD to a DVD with Norton Ghost or similar, take the laptop apart and replace the HDD with a new one (you just need to know whether it’s 1.5 inch or 2.5 inches and SATA or PATA) and then restore the contents.
Re: Desolé
Is is it Mac or PC? My Mac Powerbook died while I was on travel last fall..disk drive failed after 2 yrs. (I heard the 2 yr MTBF for disk drives on Powerbooks is common). Very inconvenient. I went to the local Walmart + bought a replacement PC (what shame!)
Re: Desolé
And on the topic of rebelious computers, did anybody found a HP laptop battery? It seems I left it in the auxiliar conference room.
Re: Desolé
Hi Jacques,
You have my sympathies. Especially because last Thursday I finally diagnosed the problem with my 15 inch powerbook that developed a while back (I’d been using another machine instead and only just got around to it). The problem? Memory! The seating for the lower memory module in those machines is known to fail, and then you lose half its memory all of a sudden. (I only later found out that this is a well known problem…and it seems that Apple would only fix a very narrow range of serial numbers of the machines affected, mine not included.) So I’m waiting for a 1G memory module to arrive to put into the upper one, to restore full capability. I suppose I might as well upgrade to Tiger while I’m at it.
Cheers,
(and Happy 4th of July!)
-cvj
Read the post
Beyond the MSSM
Weblog: Musings
Excerpt: Things I didn't blog about, but would have.
Tracked: July 5, 2007 11:43 AM
Re: Desolé
Hard disc drive problems, maybe? That seems to be the main mechanical failure cause for laptops. If it is the problem, it’s usually accompanied by a clicking sound or a slowing of boot-up. Just back up the HDD to a DVD with Norton Ghost or similar, take the laptop apart and replace the HDD with a new one (you just need to know whether it’s 1.5 inch or 2.5 inches and SATA or PATA) and then restore the contents.