Over the past few days the left button on my Logitech VX Nano had been playing up (it’s over 3 years old and has had daily use). This was especially noticeable when dragging, or holding down the button. Instead of staying down it would flicker between down and up quickly. Pressing hard worked to solve the problem but it was getting to be a pain. Before heading to Amazon to buy another, I thought I’d have a go at resurrecting it. I didn’t want to take it to bits, to do so I’d have had to remove the low-friction pads from the bottom, and they’d never go back on quite as well afterwards. Instead, I took a long-haired paintbrush with stiff (hog’s hair) bristles and had a good poke around under the button. This seems to have fixed the problem!
Posts tagged Hardware
•VX Nano Button Behaving Strangely – Fixed
•Windows Mobile 6.5 Leo
New Home Screen
I just flashed the ROM on my HTC Touch HD to Duttys HD WM6.5 Leo R4, and it’s a huge improvement. Previously I had been running Duttys HD WM6.5 R14 Turbo, which was still a huge improvement over Orange’s bundled ROM, which was WM 6.1, which didn’t help.
The Leo ROM’s main improvement is the further reach of Manila (TouchFlo 3D). Nearly everything can be accessed via Manila’s own menu system, including nearly all settings. Even on my old phone, it runs smoothly, and at startup uses less than half of the available RAM.
There are a few major updates to the familiar Manila panes, most notably the Home screen and the Contacts screen. Bother feature large customizable buttons. On the Home screen these can be pointed to apps, contacts, widgets or links, for instant access. The old contacts rolodex has gone, and now there is a large customizable button pane instead.
Flashing was a breeze, this is the third time I’ve done it now, so the whole process takes less than an hour. I have my contacts and calendar synced with my Google, via the fantastic Nuevasync, and all my apps were installed automatically during flashing, so it was just a case of re-logging in to a few things and I was good to go again!
If you want to flash your HTC WM phone, check out xda developers’ fantastic guide, it really is quite simple.
•Dell D820 Overheating – Solved
In Bits
After installing Windows 7 Pro on my sister’s Dell D820, it started randomly restarting. The fans would power up to full speed for a few seconds, the screen would flash and then the whole thing would just power off, without restarting. This was obviously a heat problem, so I downloaded the great tool (which needs a better name) i8kfanGUI, which allowed me to monitor the temperatures of the CPU and the GPU. The GPU was obviously the problem, it was idling at 70°C, while the CPU seemed ok, idling at around 45°C. When I forced the fans to full power, the GPU temp didn’t come down.
Having identified the problem, I searched the internet for a bit, and found the excellent Dell Lattitude D820 Service Manual for the D820. This document is excellent, and the fact that Dell make these would make me buy a Dell in future, over other manufacturers, as this kind of information is priceless once the machine is out of warranty.
Culprit!
At this stage, I stripped down just enough to see the GPU and cooling array, which only required taking off the keyboard to have a peek. I shone a light from one side of the GPU, and could see the light shining through, there was a gap between the heatsink and the chip! The motherboard had been replaced due to faulty sound a few months ago, and clearly the engineer didn’t replace the heatsink correctly. The problem had only become apparent now, with Windows 7′s higher graphics usage.
Solved!
I went out and bought some Thermal Grease, and set about stripping down the laptop. Getting to the cooling array involves completely dismantling the computer, and I did get a fair amount of James May style satisfaction from having the entire thing laid out, screw by screw on the table in front of me. Once I got the cooling array out, the problem was even more apparent. Both of the other chips under it had (different!) grease applied, and the plate for the GPU was bare. I applied a liberal amount of grease and screwed it back up. Opening i8kfanGUI again showed the GPU idling at about 50°C, and responding to the fan – a great improvement!
