Recent content by Stringfellow

I have an E7450 with a touch screen that started showing bubbles in the lower right corner of the screen. These look like air bubbles but I can't tell until I take the thing apart. It is out of warranty so I am doing this on my own. The bubbles don't affect the functionality of the display but...

I have been feeling nostalgic, and decided to reinstall some of my old games. I just tried to install the original Unreal Tournament, but it does not fire up the intro video, and crashes instead. It used DirectX 7, but won't launch using OpenGL renderer either. Has anyone had success in getting...

Here is the error information I saved from the old drive: smartctl 5.43 2012-06-30 r3573 [i686-w64-mingw32-win7(64)-sp1] (sf-5.43-1) Copyright (C) 2002-12 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net === START OF INFORMATION SECTION === Model Family: Hitachi Travelstar...

The Startup Recovery 3 times was Windows trying to repair the failed cloning. The original drive booted when I put it back in the laptop. I was not around when dd failed, so I did not get the information. Right now, the original drive is back in the laptop with the hard drive branded Acronis...

dd did fail, but I was not around to see what had happened. I thought it worked completely, but rebooting the machine told another story; Windows was prompting to run Start Recovery. I tried it a few times, but no luck. Put the original/bad drive back in the machine, and ran Start Recovery to...

Just a follow-up on this thread. I ran GSmartControl and looked a the SMART Error log. The software said that only the last 11 errors were recorded. Among them were multiple "pre-failure" messages for issues with reading the drive, and at least one over temperature warning. I picked up a new...

I downloaded GSmartControl, but I won't have access to the machine until the weekend. Will it provide the raw SMART data? The other thing I was going to try is to get a USB enclosure, mount the drive in it, and try to boot it that way. That should take the original hard drive controller out...

Someone asked me to look at their Gateway NV53 that takes a long, long time to boot up. Startup and login take a while, as long as 15 minutes for the machine to become useable. The hard drive light is solid the entire time it is booting, and remains that way until it has settled down. I have...

At my company, laptops are preferable to desktops, because they are easy to transport to meetings, training, etc. It also makes it easier to relocate teams to new offices. Our previous owners issued a base laptop model to almost everyone, but I did see some Developers with large ones that had...

If you don't mind my asking, which book are you using?

This is a question for the veteran progammers out there. If you were starting out as a programmer today, what would you do differently? What did you start with, and why would you start with it again, or ditch it for something new? Truth be told, I am not a programmer, but I like reading the...

I wonder how committed they are to the product in general. There are articles, quoting a Microsoft source, that MSE is a baseline product and not meant to be the best. It must not make them money, so it isn't worth improving. :(

I play the free game Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. The clan I play against/with have an ETPRO server, Jaymod server, and silEnT server. They just refreshed the maps last week. For some servers you still need an ETKEY, but PunkBuster doesn't support the game any more to create one. Some...

Flipping through the programming books for beginners, it seems that many recommend a particular compiler or IDE to download for use with the book. The problem for me is that these books seem to assume previous knowledge of using these tools to do the examples, but don't really give you much in...

Have you tried one of the fanless laptop cooling pads that just creates an air gap under the machine? You can probably make your own as long as it creates a sufficient gap beneath the machine.