Hardware & Software repairs in Skåne, Sweden?

Recently my ASUS A6000VM laptop burned its charging circuit. I wanted some help to quickly fix and either replace the parts which were burned out or just the whole motherboard / mainboard. So I contacted a guy who kept it for 21 days and in the end returned the laptop to me saying the parts were not available! I was quitte surprised and asked him as to what he was doing and he was playing around with the transistors and other components on the main board. It would have been great to replace parts of the mainboard if that would be anywhere cheap. He asked for 1500 SEK and a new main board costs around 1200 SEK. So why not just go ahead and replace the main board instead. But somehow he didn’t quite understand it.

Anyways, I am now replacing the main board myself. It is quite a task to get it in sweden but I am asking my friend in US to ship one for me. The point being it is cheap and fun to do things yourself. So if any of  you people out there needs any help with PC be it hardware or software related, just write to me: naresh at naresh.se and if you are in a place where I can reach you, then I would be glad to help you out else I can always talk on the phone or email or chat or whatever medium is accessible to me and you of course. And NO, I am not going to take any charges from you. I am just doing it for fun and to spread the knowledge around.

If I find time, I will try to make a video clip of when I disassemble my ASUS and replace the mainboard. It would be fun with a running commentary :).

Cheers & have fun computing.

We go mobile… http://mobil.naresh.se/

Type this URL in your mobile http://www.naresh.se/ and you will be amazed to see that the blog now supports mobile display sizes as well. So you can be updated all the way on any screen size and where ever you are. Enjoy the new content without straining your eyes or your fingers or your stylus.

If you want to try how it looks in the web-browser use http://mobil.naresh.se/. Alternatively to try out how it would look in different phone browsers try the following:

http://www.naresh.se/?mobile – Same as http://mobil.naresh.se/
http://www.naresh.se/?iphone – To see how the site would look on an iPhone browser
http://www.naresh.se/?operam – To see how the site would look on an Opera Mini browser
http://www.naresh.se/?msce – To see how the site would look on a Windows Mobile Pocket Internet Explorer

Of course the site detects what kind of browser/device you are using and displays everything accordingly. Allright, I know you know what I am talking about. Enjoy…

Site updates with Geishi Syntax Highlighter

Good news to all the users of this website. As you all know that you can use geishi syntax highlighter while posting your posts here, you can similarly use geishi highlighter in the forums as well. And for all the new users out here, I am going to describe on how to use the tags to syntax highlight and beautify your code.

For the blogs:

– In the editor window, select Visual and type in everything you need, don’t put any code snippets in the post anywhere yet
– Save the post and switch over to HTML editing
– Go to the place where you want to insert your code
– Start with the following tag
<pre lang=”GEISHI_SUPPORTED_LANGUAGE” line=”1″>
– Now copy and paste your code
– End with the following tag
</pre>

IMPORTANT: Do not switch back to Visual mode, simply click on “Update Post”. Switching back to Visual mode will insert some HTML tags for special characters which will mess up your code display. So only edit in HTML mode once you have your code in the post. This is not a bug/problem with this website, it is a general flaw in wordpress system.

The line=”1″ parameter is optional and is needed if you want to show line numbers along with your code. This works for the blog here. The examples can be found at: http://www.naresh.se/2009/03/30/hello-world-in-d/ and http://www.naresh.se/2009/04/09/hello-world-in-d-part-2/

For the forums:

– Start with the editor whether you are replying to a post, PM, entering a new post, topic, etc
– Write in everything that you want
– When you want to insert code, use the code tags as below:
[code=GEISHI_SUPPORTED_LANGUAGE]
– Insert code after that
– End with
[/code]

This easily integrates Geishi with the code tags inside phpbb3. It was a lot of work to do it but it finally works. As a side note phpbb people should work on improving MOD installation. Anyways but it works now. Again, do not click on Preview. Directly click Submit since Preview messes up with the spacing and general indentation of the code. I don’t know if it was only this website forum that is facing this problem.

The examples can be found at: http://www.naresh.se/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=3. Pretty cool, eh!

The GEISHI_SUPPORTED_LANGUAGE parameter is one of c, cpp, html, php, d, etc. Visit http://qbnz.com/highlighter/ for details on all the languages that it supports. As of now around 115 languages are supported and I will keep updating as more and more support is added. But do ping me if you are missing anything.

As you also might be seeing, I have a new software known as phpGedView available on the site now. Go ahead and build your own geneology tree. And you can also see the Share and Leave Comment links on the main site posts now. Took me sometime to figure out and change the templates since I am no PHP guy but hey I can do an intelligent good copy paste at times like that :). But I have started loving php and will try to learn more of it as time permits.

iPhone 3GS suffers from heating issues…

The topic is hot from the press, “iPhone 3GS suffers from heating issues”. According to reports, the new hardware which is deemed twice as fast as the original one also consumes more power and thereby heats up the device! Now was that a secret that more powerful hardware will consume more power and will need a better heat dissipation system? Heat dissipation and thermal issues are something that every hardware manufacturer is concerned from time immemorial. Thats why the microprocessor vendors had to stop pursuing higher clock speeds and focus on multiple cores instead. Also Intel had to redesign its heat sink architecture to support for higher heat dissipation rates and better thermal management.

To continue and quote on the news: “Select iPhone 3GS buyers have complaints about battery heating issues which are mentioned at the Apple Discussion forums. It started with the French site Nowherelse.fr showing image of discolored white iPhone 3GS due to heating issues after using GPS over 3G wireless. Several tech sites also reported about the heating issues of the new iPhone 3GS. Melissa Perenson, writer for PC World and also iPhone 3GS owner reported that from day one the iPhone 3GS’ back (where the battery is placed) got warm whenever the iPhone 3GS was in use.”

Now generally if you have another phone that ends up heating as badly as iPhone does, then what do you do? Simple, you just remove the battery, put it in a lower temperature room and start using it after 5 minutes. But the amazing part about iPhone is that you cannot remove the battery hence that solution would not work. This can be a real annoyance. One of my colleagues downloaded an app for iPhone and something went wrong. The device just kept on rebooting and my friend had to go to an iPhone service center to fix it. Man it was amusing. The guy was really trying to turn the annonying restarts off but to no avail.

Anyways, I do not want to make 3Million enemies a month by critisizing iPhone. It has its own share of good things as well but some of the things are annoying just because of Steve Jobs stubbornness. I am working in the mobile industry as well as really do want to give a typical user opportunities to play around with my device instead of restricting him. Well well, good luck to iPhone to resolve that issue and the same to iPhone users.