Posts Tagged ‘Dell’

Things to try before throwing that old _____ away…

Friday, December 18th, 2009

I’m on a roll!  I’ve gotten three things to work that were headed for the scrap heap:

  1. My dad’s Gateway notebook computer.  It’s maybe 5 years old, running Windows XP Home.  It had slowed to an agonizing crawl, and my dad was thinking about tossing it.
  2. My old Dell P991 Ultrascan monitor.  Maybe 6-7 years old.  It was working okay, but it couldn’t show a true “black,” and there were these tiny green diagonal lines spaced apart by two inches or so.  Really annoying, but I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away.
  3. My old Zenith color TV.  Maybe 8+ years old.  It was working fine, but then one day, the greens started looking blue, and the picture in general had an orange tint.

Here’s how I fixed them, without spending a dime:

It turns out that the old Gateway computer was the victim of the security suite that comes with Verizon FiOS.  (My dad had recently switched over from Optimum Online.)  I uninstalled the Verizon bloatware, and all of a sudden the notebook was blazing fast.  (I subsequently installed Microsoft’s free Security Essentials software, which apparently has a way smaller footprint than the Verizon package.)

I fixed my Ultrascan monitor by rolling the driver back to the OEM driver that came with the monitor all those years ago.  I then used the “color return” feature, and the monitor is now as good as ever, with true black and without those unbelievably annoying green lines.

I fixed my old Zenith color TV by unplugging it (literally pulling the plug out of the socket), and leaving it unplugged for 2 hours.  (I found this tip somewhere or other on the internet — it acts as a hard reset.)  Amazingly, when I plugged it in again, the greens had come back.

Hope this helps!

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Tech Tips: The Dreaded Blinking Yellow Light

Monday, June 16th, 2008

My Dell Optiplex PC wouldn’t start, and the on/off button was blinking yellow.

It turns out that this was Blinky, the dreaded blinking yellow light (the power supply equivalent of Blooey, the dreaded Windows blue screen of death).

Of course, I didn’t have a current backup for the bricked computer, and the warranty had expired.

I found one quick fix on the internet: checking all of the USB ports to make sure that none of them had messed-up contacts that might be causing a short circuit. No such luck — my USB ports all looked fine.

I considered trying to install a replacement power supply into my PC, but I found a bunch of posts on the internet from people who had tried replacing the power supply and/or the motherboard (!) without success.

I decided, for the time being, to abandon the Brick, and to try to salvage my data by installing the Brick’s hard drive into another computer.  (What?  You don’t have a second computer on your desk?  What kind of Geek are you?)  Sad to say, the hard drive from the Brick was a SATA drive.  The second computer (an older model) only had IDE connectors.

No problem.  I went to the local build-it-yourself computer store and bought a hard drive enclosure (sometimes called a “shell”) for $50.  (You can undoubtedly find one for less, but I was in a hurry.)

I installed the Brick’s hard drive into the shell, and then plugged the shell into the second computer’s USB 2.0 port.  I was back in business in under 30 minutes.   If you look on the internet, you can find web pages explaining how to run email and other apps from an external drive.

I then ordered a used, off-lease computer at www.dfsdirectsales.com.  Assuming I read the spec sheets correctly, I should be able to cannibalize the Brick for stuff like RAM, etc., and install it into the new computer.  Total price, including shipping:  $278.00.  (If I had been more confident about being able to salvage parts from the Brick, I could have gotten out for $50+ less.)

So, all in all, Blinky only cost me about 90 minutes of downtime, and $328.  Plus, I get a new computer!  (Well, it’s new to *me*, anyway…)

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