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Stuff posted in this site by me.
foyobli: here is a helpful flow chart I made tonight. But…
Fixing a seemingly dead HP DV7 4060us
The Symptoms:
System is a laptop, namely a HP Pavilion dv7-4060us Entertainment Notebook PC. Upon pressing the power button, CPU fan spins up, then spins down to nominal speeds, caps lock light blinks once per second, WLAN light is a solid yellow/amber, and the LCD screen does not power on at all (as opposed to powering up but being blank) so there is no indication of POST.
This points right away to some sort of hardware failure, since the computer is by this point an eight pound paperweight.
The Diagnosis
Removed battery, HDD, RAM, CMOS battery for 15 minutes.
Reinstalled CMOS battery, RAM, battery. Connected AC adapter, same symptoms occur.
Checking HP’s support site for the DV7 gave no indication of HP even acknowledging the issue even exists.
A quick Google search gives various articles but the first two are the most relevant. This is from the first forum post:
“I’m on my sister’s laptop right now because when I went downstairs earlier my own computer decided to ‘check-out.’ Came back, black screen, flashing caps lock, tried to reboot, tried the hard reboot, nothing.
“Found a forum where some whack job with the same problem wrapped theirs in a sweater for 30 minutes and it fixed the problem. Click to the next page, tons of people swearing it works. Apparently, the intentional overheating causes it to power down appropriately then reboots. We’ll see if that works.”
While the second post appears to shed a little more light on the problem:
So I take it home, try usb bios reflash, no go. Capslock light blinks, no other lights, sounds, nothing.
Ok. So I open it, get my harborfreight heating gun and heat up both the video chips. The AMD one and the ATi one. As shown in picture below.
As soon as I put it all together and plug it in, it starts working and has been, constantly since two weeks ago. This laptop has not been turned off, standby nothing. Works perfectly. Sound, video, HDMI port all alive. Still switches video cards when you unplug the power adapter.
Hope this helps.
Also, this same solution worked for a Compaq Presario CQ60. That laptop didnt pickup the bios reflash either no matter what I tried. Turned on immediately after heating the video chip.
This reminded me of the Xbox 36’s Red Ring of Death (There’s even a wikipedia article for all the issues it had!) and the first solution people found for it: The towel method. iFixit later came up with a more elaborate method that, like the post on Notebook Review, targets the culprit component: the video chipset.
The Fix
The DV7 was turned on, wrapped in a blanket, and left alone for half an hour. When the time was up, the laptop was turned off and let cool down for fifteen minutes. Powering it gave the symptoms. Laptop was turned on again, wrapped in a blanket, and then in another blanket, and left alone for two hours. When time was up again, laptop had powered off by itself. Unwrapped it, let it cool down for fifteen minutes. Power on gave POST, along with a helpful error message from the BIOS complaining about there being no hard drive installed in the system.
Hard drive was reinstalled. Powering on gave POST, then Windows boot. Windows didn’t seem to have any problems apart from having the wrong datetime, but that was expected since the CMOS battery was taken out. Device Manager reported no hardware issues
Commentary
Since the hardware is now suspect, I told the owner of the laptop to better start saving for a replacement. At least now the whole thing turned from an unexpected monetary outlay into an expected expense. What gives me pause is that the DV7, like the Xbox 360, also has an AMD Radeon video chipset, so it could indicate an issue with AMD’s fabrication processes and that other laptops that have come out with the same chipset or components from the same AMD manufacturing lines will have the issue as well.
This should be on the books
There was really no threat of invasion though. While the final battle between the Mexica and the Native/Spanish forces is often lumped together as the "Siege of Tenochtitlan" there were skirmishes and battles happening around the Lake Texcoco basin.
via 400-Rabbits comments on What were the fortifications of Tenochtitlan before Cortés' conquest?.
I had always imagined that the Siege was mostly an overland affair, never really taking into account the fact that the whole city was on an island. Yeah, sure, the fact Cortes had ships built is mentioned, but you can’t have a clear idea of how they were used with two or three paragraphs in a school history textbook.
It shows the influence of modern geography on the perception of events that happened centuries ago.
Wallowing in it, in a bad way
My work has taken me on visits to a lot of classes. The thing that I have noticed is that a poor person will have zero idea what to do with a 401K should they get one. A rich person will have no idea how to cash a check if they don’t have a bank account. It’s a completely different skillset with disparate goals and values and norms. It is definitely a different culture.
For example: You need to score some illicit drugs. How do you do that? Rich answer: Ask your assistant. Middle-class answer: Ask your teenager. Poor answer: Walk outside.
Why I Make Terrible Decisions, or, poverty thoughts.
I’ve been there. I can consider myself fortunate that I’ve been able to let go of most vices, most wants, and am able to go for long stretches of time without actual employment.
But a big part of that is thanks to the middle-class trappings of my lower-class life. I live in a house with a full kitchen, laundry room, all utilities; all for a ridiculously low price. Were I renting an apartment by myself, I’d be working two jobs just to be able to pay rent, nevermind having the time to cook at home and go to the movies every so often.
I am fortunate to know how people of all social walks have lived, having been exposed to all of them at least briefly throughout my life. I know how to deal with rich people without having them try to own me. I know how to interact with middle class people in a fair manner. I know how to hustle with the poor like one of them — I know I’m poor but I try to afford myself the luxury of not feeling poor. Feeling poor saps your body of energy, robs your mind of steel and your spirit of joy.
But I can attest to the knowledge that it is hard to look at the stars while your back is bent toward the ground.
Same way you seduce any woman who is constantly standing on hard floors: rub her feet.
The question is How do you seduce a lady chef ? over at KitchenConfidential.
This is why it’s better to just keep the matress on the…
This is why it’s better to just keep the matress on the floor. Less creaking during sexy fun times too.
On The Meaning of Meals and their future
Subtitled “the invention of the American meal,” Three Squares is an engaging and eye-opening look at the economic and cultural forces that have shaped the country’s shifting formats of consumption over time — and, in turn, the changing meanings and value judgments that Americans have attached to those eating patterns.
As a child of two countries, I can attest to the differences in food culture even when both of those countries are neighbors, but derive from completely different source cultures.
In Mexico, born of Spain and the old Mexica empire it, the food schedule is something like this:
- Breakfast varies by family and, when heading out on your own as an adult, by person. Some eat heavy breakfasts, others keep it extremely light.
- Lunch again varies by family and individual, mostly depending on work/school schedules. Usually kept to a single protein-based entree.
- Dinner is in the late afternoon. It’s the one time the whole family sits down and interacts, usually over two or three courses (soup, entree, dessert).
- Supper (usually known as the cena is usually kept light, owing to the fact it is usually eaten one or two hours before bedtime. Usually sweet bread and milk.
In my experience in both countries, it has been lunch that has been influenced the most by Mexico’s imitation of the cultural mores of the United States. For children and teenagers, lunch is usually had during recess at school. For adults, it varies wildly depending on the job and the availability for time, like breakfast.
Now, in the US, it usually goes like this:
- Breakfast is usually two courses (fruit, protein) accompanied by juice and/or coffee.
- Lunch again varies by family and individual depending on school/work schedules Schools try to have two courses on a single tray, while most adults go for a single entree.
- Dinner is late in the evening, with three courses always called for (soup or salad, entree, dessert).
- Supper is mostly a snack.
Mind you, these is what I remember from my own family experience. Being of Mexican origin, my elders tried to keep the schedule mostly the same but things had to change by necessity and adaptation of the social mores of our new adopted home.
Musical redshift, I guess
This is Belgium Part Two: Cherry Moon On Valium on Vimeo
via This is Belgium Part Two: Cherry Moon On Valium.
Suddenly you realize dubstep was invented in the 90s. It just wasn’t called that yet.
Rip ’em a new one!
Anatomy of a password disaster – Adobe’s giant-sized cryptographic blunder | Naked Security.
I read a few things about this on twitter, and the one that most stuck with me went something like this:
Out of the whole Adobe hack, the only people coming out looking good are the people who pirated Photoshop.
I, for one, will stick to The GIMP.
pauvremelodynelson: formfollowsfunctionjournal: After…
After graduating from Emory University, top student and athlete Christopher McCandless abandoned his possessions, gave his entire $24,000 savings account to Oxfam and hitchhiked to Alaska to live in the wilderness.
#where he starved to death due to his own incompetence #i feel like that’s relevant
As it turns out… that idea might be wrong:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/09/how-chris-mccandless-died.html
tomboykitten: bahamutzero: Gender: a visual guide. When most…
Gender: a visual guide.
When most people think of the gender spectrum, they think in terms of blue and pink, and maybe some purpley stuff. That model isn’t much of a spectrum and is rather a scale of femininity vs masculinity, when in reality gender is only sometimes on those terms, and is a huge, multi-dimensional concept that simply can’t fit on a single line. At this point, I would like to propose the term "gender sphere” rather than “gender spectrum” to emphasise its absolute complexity.
this is good yes
rlly tired of a sliding scale between two end points being used as a rejection of a binary
Even though there are three axes, it could be missing a fourth, or a fifth.
Best to think of it all like a big ball of wibbly wobbly… time-y wimey… stuff.
I’ll laugh when you get nuked too
#1: I will bring my progeny here and inform him that every thing that the light touches is our kingdom.
#2: What about that dark area to the left?
#1: That is Brooklyn, full of tattooed hipsters and the middle class, it is beyond our kingdom and he must never go there.
I did laugh out loud at it.
