Saturday, August 18, 2012

My New Toshiba AMD Notebook Rocks!


I finally broke down and bought a laptop. I was looking for something I could afford, without sacrificing performance. After a tiring search I finally came across the Toshiba Satellite with a 320GB hard drive and 3GB of RAM stock. I was stoked. This thing runs Windows 7 like it's ready for 8. Needless to say I am well please. Now I'm using it for school and  running the computer repair business all on the same machine. Guess it's time to ditch the tower. If you click the laptop here you can visit Toshibas website and check the specs yourself. From the Toshiba Website: Designed for great everyday performance, Satellite range products are affordable but serve up the power, features and portability that even the most demanding home users require. You can buy Satellite products through an extensive network of high street and online retailers.

Thursday, August 2, 2012

Dell XPS A2010 Plays a Good Game


The Customer reported not being able to use the cd drive on this all in one desktop. This usually doesn't present a problem since Windows can be loaded and installed on a USB flash drive. The program I use is 'Win to Flash' and takes about 10- 15 min to transfer from disk to USB. Unfortunately this a2010 Dell XPS does not have an available option in the BIOS to Boot from any kind of external device. The options are- hard drive, disk, or network. There is way to load the OS on the hard disk and install from there, I just haven't need to learn it yet. I decided to open the back and bypass the cd drive myself. This model looks impenetrable without a trace of a screw until you take a real good look underneath the screen. There's a screw on both sides that's completely camouflage.  With those 2 out the back cover slides up.

The computer was brought to me over a blue screen error. Most times reinstalling the OS corrects the problem. My problem was the installing kept hanging before displaying the available drives to choose from. Realizing this was probably a hardware issue, I connected to a new HD and still I'm still hanging. Bad RAM?? I pulled one of the two chips and BINGO! --it finally begins the installation. Out of curiosity I opened the customers disk drive to see why disks kept being spit back at me and JACK POT!  Apparently their kid fed a poker chip into the disk slot. On the customer's return I told the kid "You play and good game, next time keep your chips on the table."