It's been a very short journey for the LaCie ItsAKey rugged USB stick. It lasted for 7 months and its the first USB stick that ever died till now. The intention of it's rugged design was probably to last a lot longer but it doesn't. Have a look.
 

DELL DW-1370 miniPCI WIFI adapter

From start the DELL DW-1370 Wireless WIFI miniPCI adapter performed less than the previously used Intel 2915ABG. The DW-1370 range was smaller and when close to a WIFI access point it seemed more vulnerable to signal reflections and dead spots. Even worse it’s WIFI performance slowly degraded over time up to the point it got ridiculous. Find out what happened.
 

The USB port of a Nokia  N95 8 GB suddenly stopped working. A dig deep into the problem revealed a broken USB port in the N95. Read about it there.
 

Windows is amazing - it comes with new exciting messages when you least expect it. After having to pull the plug on one of Windows infamous lockups, it starts with a new message on a blue screen: Volume is Dirty - CHKDSK is verifying files.

Occasionally the DELL SX280 Optiplex booted with a BIOS warning "time-of-day" not set. Because the SX280 came from long-time storage, it wasn't really surprising for this to happen. The internal battery was probably depleted. After installation in The Machine the BIOS message came more often, so it was time for a quick CMOS battery replacement. But as usual the battery replacement wasn't that easy after-all.

Quite a while after replacing the LCD screen inverter the LCD screen of the Dell Latitude D610 started to have problems. After several weeks the screen died with tell tale signs of CCFL back-light tube malfunction. The screen had been used to the extreme, here the story of a dying CCFL tube.

Sharing files and printers on a local Microsoft windows network can be hell. Specially when there are firewalls involved blocking the required local communication. Here's a few bits and pieces how to get file and printer sharing going again on an Internet connected Windows XP machine. In this case with McAfee Security Center, Firewall and Virus Scanner.

No doubt, the 1 TeraByte Samsung Spinpoint F1 is one of the cheapest 3,5" TeraByte disks in the summer of 2009. The disk is aggressively promoted in Europe as super savers for around € 60,- ( approx. 86 US$) . After buying 3 disks, one Samsung Spinpoint disk only lasted for 10 days in a DELL Optiplex SX280 after it caused the infamous 2 beeps with BIOS message "No Boot disk found, press F1 to retry or F2 to for setup". The other 2 Samsung disks also have issue's. Time for some digging.

There are as many reasons to PC problems as there are PC's in the world, but some really stick out and makes fault finding hell. If there's one it's random problems, one's that occur at random so now and then. So here's one, related to random CD/DVD drive failure and a PC that doesn't start. Windows or Linux OS has nothing to do with it, the randomness comes from hardware failure...but where? Read on!

During disk defragmentation on a D610 Latitude laptop, battery charging suddenly shuts down. At first it seemed like the dreaded "ID chip failure", a design fault in DELL AC adapters. but nothing like that. Read more about temperature issue's in DELL laptop series.