Monday, June 23, 2008

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My Zimbio
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Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Sofeware and laptop battery life

whether your laptop runs three or four hours on a full charge with no extra messing around, or whether it dies in less than an hour, there are ways of extending the battery life like pa3107u-1brs through software settings. This notebook came equipped with a number of profiles optimized for different tasks. These are shown above, and for the main part, they are designed for the computing task, rather than for the extending the battery life like toshiba satellite a75 battery life to the maximum. In other words, they assume that you want DVD playback to proceed without any stumbles, and that you’d never want your hard drive to spin down or video output to wink off during a presentation. In none of the profiles to they drop the CPU processing speed (see graphic to the left) below the halfway point, 3 on a scale of 1 to 5. The settings they are most willing to sacrifice are the LCD brightness and the cooling method. Lower LCD brightness certainly extends battery life such as pa3383u-1brs a little but it’s so easy to manually adjust the LCD brightness from the keyboard that I don’t worry about getting it right in the profiles. In fact, when I use my notebook outside during the day, I usually find I have to run the LCD brightness up to the maximum (tapping Fn-F7 a few times) just to see.
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Tuesday, June 17, 2008

AC adapter in use?

If you see a puff of smoke or smell a burning odor and the AD adapter is in use, you should unplug it immediately if you can. I’ve burnt my fingers on short circuited wires more than once, so exercise extreme caution. When there’s a risk of fire, as documented in laptops with defective batteries like toshiba pa3383u-1brs,  your first priority should be guarding against an outbreak of fire, not worrying about the laptop condition or studying this flowchart. Some people will immediately call the fire department or grab the fire extinguisher at the first sign of smoke in electronics, I’m more of a “move it outside” type, but again, I’ve been burned doing it. If there are flames coming out of the laptop, it’s history, so the fire extinguisher or fire department are the way to go. If it’s just the odor of smoke, unplugging the AC may preserve a laptop battery like pa3383u-1brs that can be reasonably repaired.

Troubleshooting the cause of the smoke, unless you just poured your coffee on the keyboard, requires taking the laptop apart and visually inspecting the components down to the board level. If the laptop battery like toshiba pa3384u-1bas at all hot, wait for it to cool before attempting dissembly. Always remove the battery pack such as toshiba pa3356u-1brs before opening up a laptop. Since component spacing in laptops is so tight, you’ll rarely get lucky enough to zero in on the problem with your sense of smell, which is sometimes effective with larger desktop computer components. Inspect the circuit boards, connectors, remove and inspect the drives. Pay special attention to electrolytic capacitors and discrete power semiconductors, usually located very near the power input. If you find a burnt spot or signs of melting on a discrete component, such as a hard drive, dvd drive, capacitor or power semiconductor, there’s a reasonable chance that the failure was internal to that component and that replacing it will fix the problem. If there’s a large burnt or melted spot on the main circuit board, the notebook is probably toast, it’s rarely cost effective to even attempt a replacement.

If the problem was a hot plastic odor and you can’t find any signs of damage during your visual inspection, it’s possible that the laptop battery such as toshiba pa3356u-1bas was overheating and you caught it in time. Some people are more sensitive than others to plastic odors, and there is always the possibility that a little foreign matter, food or insect, found it’s way into the notebook and got incinerated. Read over the procedures for troubleshooting laptop battery e.g.  pa3291u-1brs overheating, as if you never encountered the burnt odor, to make sure the notebook wasn’t operated in such a way that it was being encouraged to battery e.g. pa2487ur overheat, check the fans and the vents.

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Monday, June 16, 2008

Extend the life of laptop batteries

The real value, or nuisance value, of the factory set battery life like toshiba pa3356u-1bas profiles are the automatic shutdowns, In the aggressive battery such as toshiba satellite a65 battery saver modes, the hard drive spins down every time it’s not accessed for a minute or two, and the LCD winks out if you don’t hit a key or move the mouse every minute. While the LCD coming on and off can be annoying, it probably doesn’t waste extra power, but I believe that frequently spinning the hard drive up and down rather than just keeping it going can waste more power than it saves. Likewise, hibernate and standby can help conserve battery life e.g. toshiba a75 battery if you’re going to remain in that mode for a while, but going into hibernation every five minutes and having to wake up again is probably a wash, because hibernate is actually doing work saving an image of your desktop and then shutting down the power. When you power up again, the system is doing a lot of work to restore your desktop, as opposed to preserving it in a low power state. Standby does just that, extending battery life such as toshiba a65 battery by preserving everything in memory but shutting down all of the user interfaces. A laptop might be able to preserve it’s current state on standby for a day or two on a full charge, but it’s really for moving from the cafe back home, or between your office and a meeting.
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Thursday, June 12, 2008

Hot spot, fan always runs?

 Many laptop brands and models have characteristic hot spots, like a particular corner of the keyboard or over the battery compartment. Before proceeding with the more invasive cleaning techniques that involve opening up the laptop (and potentially breaking something), spend some time searching the web for user feedback on your make and model. The bothersome hot spot on your laptop battery like toshiba pa2487u-1brs  that none of your friends or colleagues have ever hear of may be a characteristic issue with your particular model and not worth a major panic.Similarly, if the fan always runs, or almost always runs, it may be a characteristic of the particular model that it simply gets hot in normal operation, or the fan control software might be poorly conceived. As long as the laptop battery such as toshiba pa2487u-1brs battery isn’t overheating, I’d probably learn to live with a fan that seems to run too much if it’s typical for the model, and only get worried when I don’t hear it anymore.
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Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Cool settings laptop BIOS and OS?

There’s no universal standard for what BIOS settings are user adjustable for a given brand or model of laptop battery such as battery toshiba satellite a75 s209 pa3383u-1brs. If you can lower the temperature at with the fan automatically powers up and you’re having overheating problems, it can’t hurt to do so, though you should also try the less invasive cleaning techniques given at the end of this flowchart. There are a large number of OS (Operating System) settings that affect the amount of heat the laptop will generate, from the speed of the processor and the brightness of the screen to the efficiency of the cooling system. The manufacturers try to give the user as much control as possible, but if you or another user ran the cooling control down to the minimum to reduce fan noise or extend battery life e.g.  toshiba satellite A70 battery, it may be time to compromise.

On the other hand, if the settings are all on the defaults, the fan never comes on, and the system is overheating, it’s either a fan failure or a problem with the control circuit. The fan itself is a replaceable DC fan that usually can be replaced without removing the heatsink (if it’s mounted directly on the CPU or graphics processor). One simple test for notebook fans is to blow on them. If the fan doesn’t spin, either the bearing has failed or something is melted or jammed, because the motors are tiny. Testing the control circuit is an open-unit bench job that I don’t recommend unless you are an experienced technician. It’s easier to just replace the fan with a known good unit, and if it still doesn’t work the problem is in the controller or the power supply to the fan.

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Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Is your laptop battery too hot?

 Some people are more sensitive to temperature than others, so using “too hot to touch” isn’t a great troubleshooting technique. Unfortunately, very few people have a thermometer around capable of measuring temperatures through the normal operation range of a battery like Toshiba satellite A70 battery, including most computer technicians, so touch is all most people will have to go on. If the battery e.g.  toshiba pa3384u-1bas seems excessively hot, first shut down, check the web to see if it’s been included in a recall or if a hot battery such as toshiba pa3383u-1brs is typical of the the particular laptop model. Then proceed to the battery like toshiba pa3107u-1brs troubleshooting flowchart.
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Monday, June 9, 2008

Is your laptop battery getting high air temp or sun?

All laptops will overheat if you use them in a cruel enough environment. Obvious examples are stifling hot attics, vehicles without air conditioning in the summer and placed on hot surfaces. Hot surfaces aren’t limited to radiators or desks touching steam pipes, they also include dark surfaces the get a lot of direct sunlight, even if they are located indoors. Using a laptop outside in direct sunlight in the summer is more than a problem for your eyes, it’s also likely to lead to overheating. Notebook computers are entirely reliant on air flow for cooling, and the higher the ambient air temperature, the less the laptop battery like toshiba satellite a65 battery will be able to cool itself.
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