mathog
Badcaps Legend
Last Activity: 04-04-2016, 10:36 PM
Joined: 03-15-2010
Location:
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Stinky Emacs AX2-5300FB-2S
At work my office shares an air supply with a computer machine room. For the last couple of weeks there has been a sort of ozone, hot component, vaguely smokey smell in the air. Today I figured since whatever it was had not yet gone up in flames I should probably find it, preemptively. It was a pain finding it because there is so much air circulating in the machine room that it is hard to pin down a smell. After sniffing everything in the room the odor was narrowed down to 3 rack mounted computers (of course, the top three), and took each one apart and sniffed inside. The smell seemed to come... -
Re: Best tape for a cracked case?
K53S and K53U cases are interchangeable? -
Re: Best tape for a cracked case?
I'm not sure of what the proper terminology is, but my son's Asus laptop has three case components: a base, a top, and a lid. The display is in the lid, the keyboard is in the top, and the base is, well, the base, the part that sits on one's lap or on a table. Those pictures appear to only show a lid. The lid on my son's Asus is fine, in fact it is the only part of the case that isn't falling apart. Do you also have a top and a base?...Leave a comment:
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Re: Best tape for a cracked case?
ASUS K53U-DH21
Regarding a binder clip - I think that would make things worse. It would tend to put a lot of pressure on the few points where it contacts the case, deforming it there. Yeah, I know binder clips have two flat surfaces but unless the size is just right those will not be parallel to the front and rear of the machine.
I spoke to a tech/sales person in 3M's consumer tape products line and she said they didn't have anything appropriate for this. The industrial side might, but that stuff is...Leave a comment:
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Re: Best tape for a cracked case?
That was the first thing I tried, when it just started to break apart. Neither JB Weld nor a generic epoxy did the trick. The case seems to be a little flexible and eventually both of those cracked and released. It was also a total PITA setting the nuts so that the goop didn't get inside on the threads....Leave a comment:
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Best tape for a cracked case?
My son's old Asus laptop's plastic case is pretty much falling apart. Two of the corners are held together with tape. That actually works pretty well but the tape eventually lets go. So far I have tried Scotch tape (transparent plastic), masking tape (paper), and some metallic tape that was laying around in the garage (no markings on the roll, no recollection what I bought it for). Of the three, the Scotch tape actually held up the best. The masking tape only held up for a couple of weeks, and the metallic tape does a very poor job, apparently because the adhesive lets go. I had hoped that the... -
Re: Battery Connector Shorted on Laptop
Perhaps somebody else here could use that. I only ever fix broken ports, which can be soldered in. Mucking around with the electronics on laptops isn't something I indulge in - in large part because I don't have the tools to work on surface mount components, and pretty much everything there is surface mount. The other part is that the that break electronically tend to be crap anyway, and it is hardly worth fixing them. Yours might be worth the effort since you blew it up, rather than it failed by itself....Leave a comment:
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Re: Battery Connector Shorted on Laptop
Sounds like you did:
power adapter and battery
power adapter, no battery
what happens on boot for
battery, no power adapter?
If that works you may have just trashed the power adapter. That would be a best case scenario, since those are cheap to replace....Leave a comment:
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Re: Any Dell's more reliable than others these days?
They bought an Optiplex, not sure of the model number. Had it open yesterday to plug in the disk from the old machine, so that they could copy their files over. Not terribly impressed with the case metal - much too thin for my taste. Not the worst I have ever seen, that honor went to a case I could have smashed by just leaning on it, but thin enough that a moderate smack in the side is going to ding it.
Oddly the disk from the old machine (green plastic rails) would not fit into the empty disk bay on the new machine...Leave a comment:
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Re: Dropped PC - Bad HDD?
This varies. Some drives will keep error counts when they write a sector, it fails, they swap it out, etc. until they find a good spare sector. Others don't. So two disks can read "no errors" even though one is down to its last spare block and the other hasn't touched a single one. Some WD's are like that. I have seen these on linux systems where they fail a SMART test, and I force it to swap it out by writing to that block with "dd", and when it is done all the relevant error counters are back to zero. Others keep accurate...Leave a comment:
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Re: Dropped PC - Bad HDD?
In my experience once the error rates start ramping up on a disk, any error rates, the device will soon become useless. Dropping it may have broken off/knocked loose a bit of grit which is now dancing around on the platters. Get any data you want off that disk now....Leave a comment:
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Any Dell's more reliable than others these days?
Are any Dell desktop's more reliable than others these days?
A group at work want to buy a new Dell, not for anything heavier than a bit of light image processing. I have not opened a Dell more recent than about 5 years old, so have no idea what the new ones are like inside.
If it must be a Dell (and that seems to be the only brand they want to consider), what model should they go with? It is far more important that the thing run reliably a long time than that it be fast. -
Re: DVD-RW Optical Drives. Why so crappy?
Do you really mean jammed, or just that the rubber O ring has rotted and fallen off? That happens eventually to every drive that uses that mechanism. Easy enough to fix - if you can find a similarly sized O ring to replace it. These never seem to be available anywhere local though....Leave a comment:
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Re: cable modem frequently disconnects
Heat?
Cable modems tend to run pretty warm, and since it is August in India, one suspects that the operating environment may be very much on the toasty side. You say it is going off line morning to afternoon, and that would correspond more or less to the warmest part of the day. If your house has A/C then the problem could still be heat, but in the ISPs circuitry. Do your neighbors lose service at the same times, or is it just you?...Leave a comment:
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Samsung LN40B550 dark scenes (only) no contrast
We have an LN40B550 Samsung LED flatscreen and for some dark scenes, in some shows, there is practically no contrast. Ironically "Blacklist" is particularly prone to these. The thing is, in general terms, the color and grey scale calibration is perfect. When a grey scale image is fed in from a laptop through the SVGA port it is perfect. Similarly when this set of video test patterns is fed in through an HDMI connection from the bluray player (which has a youtube interface)
[url]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTfGuO9chAk[/url]
that is perfect too. These... -
Re: Asus K53U charging light orange, variable
The battery charges at a reasonable rate, so probably not the FETs per se, but the control circuitry for them. That would fit your IC hypothesis....Leave a comment:
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Re: Asus K53U charging light orange, variable
Whatever this is it is getting worse. Now the power LED turns completely off instead of going to orange. When Windows 7 is running every time it transitions the damned ASUS ATK driver pops up a graphic saying "on battery" or "on ac". The usual W7 power icon changes shape too.
Here is the really strange part...
If the battery is removed and the charger plugged in the machine runs with no problems. I only tested it that way for 10 minutes, but since the power on/power off cycles are never...Leave a comment:
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Re: Portege R500, neither control key works
Oddly the UK keyboards seem to cost 1/3 as much as the US ones - and both are coming from China. In any case, for now I just remapped the windows keys to ctrl under both Linux and W7, which made the machine usable again....Leave a comment:
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Re: Asus K43s Laptop Automatic Power On when charger plugged where to start?
Look through the BIOS for "power on" settings. Most computers have one that causes them to boot when power is applied, and it sounds like that is the way yours is set....Leave a comment:
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Re: Portege R500, neither control key works
Also, the keyboard is apparently glued in place:
[url]https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Toshiba+Portege+R500+Keyboard+Replacement/28847[/url]
Weird.Re: Portege R500, neither control ke... <br /> Weird.Re: Portege R500, neither control key works
Also, the keyboard is apparently glued in place:
[url]https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Toshiba+Portege+R500+Keyboard+Replacement/28847[/url]Leave a comment:
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