Sunday Fixing

That would be the best and shortest way to describe my day. Right from 12:00 am in the morning, I have been fixing various issues with the devices I own. These include the new Dell Laptop, the Xoom tablet and the Galaxy S2. The galaxy S2 didn’t have any issues as such, but I was just trying out various different ROMS on the device and then pretty much lost it with the MIUI. Very very annoying and ugly interface for me, thankfully I had done a nandroid backup of the CM7.1 nightly I was running. So that was that. The SGS issues were at 4:00am.

Now coming to the windows installation on my machine, that is the new dell laptop, I had blown up the MBR. What happened was that I wanted to try out the MAC OSx on my laptop. But do go ahead with it, I first had to remove the linux installation on the machine and reclaim the drive space. Once that was done, it was all easy, atleast supposed to be easy to just boot into windows recovery using the Windows Home Premium boot disk that I had. But somehow it just wouldn’t boot into windows. I was quick to give up on it and downloaded an image from the web which could be made out to a Windows boot disk. Turns out, that image was only for installation of windows 7 and not for any recovery activities. Annoyed me a lot, but then, I had to go back to the earlier disk and it finally worked. So when all this was done, it was already 3:00am and so started playing with the Galaxy S2.

And finally, the Xoom. This was in the late afternoon today. I was using this tiamati Rom on it, which pretty much labelled the tablet as a Verizon Xoom and any update that Google pushed to it would brick it. So I just went back, i.e. tried to go back to the earlier stock build of Xoom which I had nandroided. I was in for a surprise when I did this, the wifi wouldn’t just start, let alone scan and connect. So I again went online to look for a stock rom. Found a rooted one, downloaded it but sadly, this one had another issue. Again it was with wifi, the drivers installed or something about the wifi module was so wrong that it would scan the networks but never accept any DHCP ip addresses and also wouldn’t let me set any on the tablet. So downloaded the retail copy of the ROM from the Motorola Dev site and then had to manually flash the system, boot and other images onto the Xoom using fastboot. Fortunately it worked alright.

So till the internet from plusnet is properly installed here, have to stick to the 3 unlimited internet plan. Bad weekend, but on the plus side, 28 more work days till I finally get to back HOME!

Popping sounds in XPS

I have recently blogged about how I wanted a new laptop, a laptop refresh if you will. I finally bought a Dell XPS 15, decently spec’d, got enough juice to last at least 5 hours and runs graphics and everything very well. Is a tad heavy but no build issues otherwise. So, I was surprised to find this laptop have some very awesome sounding laptop speakers, actually the most awesome speakers that I have seen in a laptop ever! I was very glad that the laptop had brought with it a very good surprise. But there was an underlying issue with this.

The woofer located at the bottom of the laptop would stutter while playing some music or even while doing some simple gaming. This soon became very annoying. So instead of calling up the Dell customer support, I started browsing their forums. Turns out, this is a very widespread issue. But I soon found out that this was a software issue and not a hardware one as most of the people on the site had fixed their popping issues by either removing some unwanted drivers, some Dell crapware and some other unwanted software. Some had a few cores disabled, enabling which fixed the issue. Some even suggested to stop/unisntall the Mcafee installation available with the laptop.

So obviously, I tried it all, apart from disabling the antivirus. I had all the latest drivers as listed on the Dell support site. But turns out, the best way ahead was to go to websites of the respective vendors and update the drivers from them directly rather than via Dell. This wasn’t something suggested on the forums. So the first site I checked was nVidia and boy was I lucky to find an update for the graphics card on my system – GT-540. After downloading and installing the app, things are looking great, its sounding great, even somehow better. Maybe its because of the HD audio driver that was installed along with the Nvidia driver update. Here is the link I found for the driver, its on the Nvidia servers.

http://www.nvidia.com/content/DriverDownload-March2009/confirmation.php?url=/Windows/285.62/285.62-notebook-win7-winvista-64bit-international-whql.exe&lang=us&type=GeForce%20M

Edit: Turns out, the issue with the popping sound was not to blame on the drivers. After a few days, the issue had arisen yet again. And this time I was at loss as to what to do. Again the search for the possible solution began and on one of the threads on the dell support forums, I found a suggested solution. This was with removing the bundled Mcafee anti-virus solution. I was initially a little sceptical but common sense kicked in, I did it, installed the Microsoft Software Essentials and now… no more cracking of the sound. The sub-woofer had never sounded better. Glad this is finally fixed now…

Time for a Laptop Refresh?

I was and always have been fond of screen with high resolutions. So last year, when I spent about £611 on a Thinkpad Edge which I thought I had pimped out, I was somehow expecting a larger resolution screen. This wasn't because of any misinformation on the part of Lenovo, but it was due to my ignorance. I just assumed that the thinkpad will have a higher resolution that the HP laptop that I previously owned. The thinkpad edge laptops, regardless of the size of the screen, max out at 1366 X 768 pixels. Not my cup of tea. So after using the laptop for exactly a year, I am giving up on it. The thinkpad will be gone. Selling the damn thing off!

Thus, I need a new laptop, or maybe I tweaked the machine I had in India when I get back but till then use the existing thinkpad. I gave up on it. I thought, I'd rather use a new laptop than some old low resolution thinkpad, which, to be fair could handle a fair deal. CS5 ran very smooth on it. So now for the new laptop, my budget was teetering on £1200. It was a pretty string budget and many good laptops fell into this category.

I have always been fascinated by the MacBooks. I loved their sleek designs and the aesthetically pleasing looks and the always talked about fast performance on them. So I checked a few out, and on eBay, I found a few good deals. One of them was the latest 15incher with the 500GB HDD, i7 et all, for a reasonable £1299. It did overshoot my budget by a £99 but then I was very much for it. But then, I began thinking about the future prospects of owning a MacBook. I am a PC, through and through, and also the occasional Linux user, but never a Mac user. So, it was obvious that I would be bootcamping the MBP as soon as I got it. To do this, I would have to shell out a few more quid on the Windows DVD. Along with this, I would this I would also have to install the Visual Studio 2008 and loads of other software I need for my extra-curricular educational needs. Another factor in my waning interest in the MBP was the screen resolution. For a full HD resolution, I would have to pay a bomb and also buy via the Apple Store online, which is the costliest of the lot when buying MBPs. So I was very much in two minds about it all.

So I now started looking at the line from Dell. There were quite a few laptops available on the dell line which were well under my budget. I was exited by the Alienware series and almost bought one, but stopped short when I realised that the 14x doesn't have a 1080p screen nor does it have it as an upgrade. I also checked the line by Asus, the G53SW which looks really pretty to be fair, also the Dell Precision series but none were much  of any interest to me. So again I landed on the Dell website, and struck jackpot with the XPS 15 series. This is not the 15z, which was recently released but the XPS 15 which I literally pimped out as and then forgot to add the backlit keyboard but was finally able to get the laptop for £1089. I got a £405 discount on the laptop. The configuration of this new machine is as follows:


XPS 502x : 2nd generation Intel Core i7-2670QM processor 2.20 GHz with Turbo Boost up
to 3.10 GHz
Display : 15.6" FHD B+RGLED True-Life (1920x1080) with 2.0 Mega Pixel Integrated Camera 1 S
LCD Back Cover : Metalloid Aluminum (WLAN) L501X 1 S
Memory : 8192MB (2x4096) 1333MHz DDR3 Dual Channel
Hard Drive : 750GB Serial ATA (7200RPM) 1 S
Optical Drive : 8x DVD+/-RW Optical Drive 1 S
Battery : Primary 9-cell 90W/HR LI-ION 1 S
Graphics : 2GB NVIDIA GeForce GT 540M Graphics card

I'd say pretty sweet for £1089. Should be here with me by 16th of November.