Important business show(s) attended

Recently we had to attend the IPEXPO comptuer exhibition and companies from accross the board such as Intel, Microsoft, Dell, HP, Toshiba we're all there demonstrating their new and improved products to the IT industry.  The event was held at Earls Court London and many guests speakers we're taking part in seminars which largely dealt with Cloud computing.  There was a mini lecture theatre where one of the guest speakers gave a talk on the many different aspects of Cloud computing which is a fairly new technology being introduced into the world of computing today.

Earls Court Exhibition Hall

Theatre where talk on Cloud Computing  was being held

At one point the guest speaker was having a few teething

problems with his  wireless slides being projected             

onto the screen via projector and wireless laptop                 

(Teething problmes on day one)     

Many people turned up for this event, amazingly a new record was set and set targets for the number of people that we're suppose to attend went through roof - Many thousands of people attend this two day event and particular attention was being paid to the semminars on Cloud Computing and how this technology could find it's way into businesses and improve business twofold.  Many business leaders from many fields attended this computer show which was very popular as can been seen from the many people that attended the show.

People discussing how to improve their businesses with other companies

Motorola, who one would normally associate with mobile phones we're also at the IPEXPO exhibition launching their new product range which could vastly improve upon the way current businesses did their business using current mobile phone technology as illustrated in the following picture below.

Motorola stand divided into separate categories

Many more companies that attended this year's IPEXPO delivered some unparalled sofware that was very hard to beat.  Fro example, at the show, a company started to hand out flyers and free demonstration CD's which included software that could archive all your emails (PST files) and then transfer those archived files to appropriate mdeida such as CD/DVD, floppy disk (still in use today) tape drive, flash drive, SD memory cards for backup purposes only.  Using this sort of software allows users to back up all thier e-mails and transfer them safely to appropriate back up media instead of doing it the long way around using Outlook/Outlook Express.  This can be of great benefit should you accidentally delete your e-mails or your email contact list has become so corrupted that emails that we're once in your e-mail folder cannot be read anymore.  Backing up emails in (especially PST files which includes contact lists, phone numbers, addresses, etc) is quite a long winded process since you have to export email files to an appropriate format and then burn these files to disk.  What the email archival progam does is back-up these files and then immediately allow you to transfer these files without having to go through a long winded processes of converting/exporting PSt files to CSV and then transferring CSV files to appropriate storage media.

 A birdseye view from the upper gallery of Earl's Court   

The many thousands who attended we're all drawn to the many different stands accross the entire perimeter of Earls Court with the main attraction being  The Cloud Computing mini theatre.  On the day people got to see the latest advances in Wi-Fi software technology such as  Wi-Fi archival software (a latest development in software stnad)  stand hat can been seen in the picture above.

A new software compnay called Juniper came out with their newest product which revolutionised the way we use networks.  The new hardware had the capability of improving on other methods used when deploying sofware on much older networks.  A photo of this company is pictured below.

The New Network from Juniper

Photo of an old networking system

         NewStar Sofware discussing how to best improve business all round

A sofware company that  may be new to many of you but have been around since the 1980's is NewStar Sofware.  NewStar we're the founder makers of NewWord which was a MS-DOS program( word processor based) which was compatible with well known word processing package called Wordstar.  NewWord came on 5 1/4 " disk and was a major competitor to Wordstar.  The company has risen to new heights since the 1980's and as you can see from the photograph above, people we're having general discussions on the best way to improve their business practice with NewStar's new product range.

SONY VAIO LAPTOP - OVERHEATING PROBLEMS

Overheating problems arise in all laptops whether they be from Dell, Sony, HP, Toshiba, Esystems, etc.  Most laptops out on the market are fitted with one fan and one Heatsink but a lot of the time these fans are not capable of keeping an entire laptop computer cool and result in laptops swtiching off after they've been turned on after only a few seconds.  We went on a callout to findout what was wrong with the customer's laptop. The client told us that when the laptop was switched on, the Laptop would come on with the hard drive lights, DVD rom lights and other light indicatiors coming on indiating that power was going to the machine.  We then first thought that the ribbon conncting cable had come loose from the back of the screen so we took the screen out of the laptop to verify this.  The cable had not come loose so we put the screen back into the laptop and then thought the GPU may be playing up and overheating so we stripped the laptop down (we didn't take out the motherboard at this stage).  We then switched the laptop on and then found that that a lot of heat was coming out of the laptop.  We then switched the laptop off, uplugged the power cord and then continued to strip down the laptop.  We preceeded to take off the bottom of the case which then revealed the motherboard.  We then took out all the screws from the motherboard, tookout the heatsink, leaving only the fan connected to the lower base of the laptop.  We carefully lifted out the motherboard from the bottom base of the case and then placed this on a non-metallic, non-conductive surfce.  As we had previously done this overheating job before, we then attempted to remove the old thermal compound from the GPU and CPU using a thermal removal solution that's used to remove silver thermal compound. With the remnants of the old silver compound removed we then replaced the old thermal silver compound with new silver thermal compound and then heated the GPU for 30 seconds.  After replacing the heatsink over GPU and CPU we then put back the mohterboard into the bottom base of the laptop but putting the screws back in and screwing the mothrboard back onto the case.  We then switched the laptop on and everything seemed to work.  The laptop was then switched off and put back together again.  As soon as everyhing had been put back we switched the laptop on for one final time and this resulted in Windows booting up, so again we actually fixed this machine.  The following photos will illustrate the work that we carried out for the client.

                         Client's laptop above that had overheating problems

                    

UNOPENED SONY LAPTOP

  

Data recovery - customer call out

A client called us out becasue she had lost valuable data and files such as photo, word processed file, video files and animination files.  The client had a Dell GX260 computer base which comprised of a floppy drive, 120 gigabyte, DVD Rewriter.  The hard drive had Windows 7 on it, 6 USB ports and the usual odds and ends normally associated with a computer base.  We attempted to recover all our client's files with Data Recovery Software called Recover My Files.  To use this software, we had to plug into an available USB port on the computer base, our USB pen drive that had this software on it.  We then proceeded to find the clien'ts files as the following video will show.

With many different data recovery programs available on the market, we found Recovery My Files extremely easy and straight forward to use and the user interface is not as cumbersome as many people would have you think.  Recovery My Files gave us several options to find files (i.e. Quick file search, Complete file search, Unformat hard drive Search and other searches).  We clicked on complete file search becasue we wanted to find all the files that the client told  us to find.  With Recover My Files, you're given an option that allows you to state what sort of file type your looking for (e.g. Jpeg files, Bitmap files, Word files, Excel files, etc).  You can search for over 300 + files types with Recover My Files.  We managed to file 95% of all our client files using Recover My Files. We found and recovered 28 videos on the customer's hard drive and when we clicked on each on, each of these videos worked.   Once the files we're found we then had to save these files to other storage media so we managed to save all the recovered files found to DVD. (i.e. Recover my files then burnt these recovered files to DVD storage media).   The data recovery job took us 6 hours to complete (Data recovery takes a long time when you do it properly using the complete file search).  We had to look for our customer's photos separately since choosing to look for the photo's along with other files at the same time may have led to a lot of these files not being found.  After recovering our client's files, our client seemed pleased with the results but was wondering why the data recovery process took so long.  We explained to the customer that becasue his machine had a very old processor in, the prcessor intensive task of locating and recovring files only took so long becasue of the speed and amount of memory inside the computer.  The comptuer had 1GB of ram and was struggling to cope due to lack of system resources.  The cusomter asked us if there was any way around this problem so we suggested he buy a complete new motherboard with 2 GB of memory and then call us back when he wanted the new board fitted into the case.  Within a few weeks of us completing the data recovery of the client's hard drive, the client then called us back to install a new motherboard with CPU (Dual Core motherboard with CPU).

RECOVERING DATA FROM A HARD DRIVE THAT CRASHED

A client called us out becasue the hard drive on her computer had crashed and everytime she tried to turn her computer on, after 10 seconds the computer would switch off stating because of an electrical fault (e.g. power surge) the computer would shut down so as to save files from damage on the comptuer's hard drive.  The client tried in vain to start her computer herself but had no luck so she called us.  We opened up her Packard Bell PC and saw that she had a Sata hard drive (160 GB in capacity) so lucily, on hand we had another hard drive in our  PC repair toolkit box that had Windows XP on (our hard drive was also sata 320GB) so we took out the client's hard drive from her machine and inserted our hard drive into her computer.  On switching on our client's computer, the Packard Bell machine booted into Windows XP.  We then attached a Sata docking station (i.e. a device which allows you to attach internal sata hard drives to it's unit in order for a working computer to read the information/data contained on the crashed hard drive)via USB  as illustrated below.

                                           Sata Hard Drive Docking Station

The hard drive docking station has many uses and is extremely to use, just insert the base end of the hard drive (i.e. where sata connector is) and gently push down until it snaps into place. One of the major advantages that this type of hard drive docking station has is it's ability to transfer data/files/information from one hard drive to another or other type of storage media.  It's also possible to back up the whole hard drive using back up software such as Norton's Ghost which is illustrated in the following video.

Laptop Repair - HP

Make of Laptop: HP                                                               
Model: DV 6000                   
                               
                            Fault: When laptop is turned on moments later it switches inself off

                                                                
Description of Problem

We had a call out whereby a client's laptop when turned on would turn itself off again whever a key was pressed (seconds after being turned on).  This problem occured 5 seconds after it had been switched on.  Having run into simillar problems before, we made sure to run a few diagnostic tests on the laptop to findout what was causing this intimitent problem whereby each time the laptop was switched on, it would immediately swtich off again without any user response.  One of oru first diaognostic tests that we ran tested the laptop's memory.  We took the cover off from the memory compartment becasue we thought that the memory was making the laptop react the way it was reacting (i.e. switching itself off seconds after being switched on).  After taking out the memory from the laptop, we switched the laptop on and waited for the boot screen to appear.  After a few seconds, we tried entering the bios (user response) just to see if the laptop would go into the bios or would switch itself off.  To enter the bios we had to press F2 so we pressed F2 and the laptop switched itself off.  We thought that this seems a bit odd becasue we had alrady dealt with another laptop with a simillar problem and when we took out the memory and put the memory back into the laptop, that laptop begain working and started booting into Windows XP.  We then thought that it may be the hard drive that was causing problems so we took the hard drive out of the laptop and again switched on the laptop.  Taking out the hard drive had no affect when we turned on the laptop for the third time.

At this stage we we're a bit puzzled at what was causing this fault.  We then thought it may be the screen inverter that may be cuasing the problem so we disconnected the screen. (i.e. with a very think flat head precision screwdriver we gently inserted this into the sides of the screen bezel all away round the frame of the screen, gently guiding the screwddriver down the groves of the screen bezel.  Once the fram was removed from the screen, we then disconnected the screen inverter that had been connected to the screen.  After taking this out, we then switched the laptop back on.  The laptop again, after only a few seconds of being switched on, swtiched itself off.  We then decided to disconnect the screen and take teh screen out of the frame.  After taking the screen out, we then switched the machine on again, still we we're having problems - So far we had eliminated the memory giving problmes, the screen inverter giving problems, the hard drive giving problems and the inverter giving problems and eliminating these which may have given arise to the laptop switching itslef off as soon as it was turned on.  We didn't reconnect the screen becasue we still wanted to condutct further investiagations as to why the laptop was switching itself off intimitently so we put the screen to one side, in a safe place so it wouldn't get scratched or damaged accidentally.  After removing the laptop screen and moving it to one side we then turned our attentions to the laptop's motherboard.  We had come to the conclusion that maybe a capacitor or transitor had become burnt/damaged so we got ready to take out the motherboard from the laptop.  In order for us to gain access to the laptop's motherboard, we ahd to remove the keyboard, the keyboard cable and the outer case of the laptop.                                                      

We found removing the outer casing of the laptop a bit tricky becasue it was attached to the motherboard. 



So far what we actually did was use the process of elimination to findout why the laptop had been behaving in the way that it was (i.e. finding out why the laptop was faulty using the process of elimination to draw our own conclusions).  After removing outer casing, keyboard, hard drive, DVD writer and other internal components, we then took out the motherboard to check the capacitors and transitors, looking for signs of burning.