Posts

Stefan Helander

Toshiba laptop green blinking LED light

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A Toshiba laptop I encountered recently was deemed “possibly dead”. It would not boot and screen was just black.

A blinking green LED was present, meaning the battery is discharged. Further investigation revealed that the power supply electric cord had fallen out of the socket.

Plugging it in again turned the blinking green LED to solid orange, meaning the laptop was charging and just pushing the power button made it boot up normally.

Sometimes the problems are too simple 🙂

Stefan Helander

Compaq HP 6910p with builtin 3G/GSM modem and Windows 7

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A while ago I decided to start fresh with my HP Compaq 6910p laptop so I installed a new harddisk and Windows 7. My 6910p has an internal 3G/GSM modem (HS2300). When visiting the HP Support & Drivers page for the 6910p and Windows 7 I discovered there are no drivers or software for this 3G modem under Windows 7.

However, it turns out that both the driver and the connection manager for Vista works in Windows 7.

Download and install:

  1. HP WWAN Broadband Wireless drivers
  2. HP WWAN Connection Manager
  3. HP Broadband Wireless Client for Vodafone (or if there is one for your provider, pick that one instead)

If your 3G/GSM provider is Vodafone you’re done now. In my case I use the Swedish provider Tre (3). To use the Vodafone Connection Manager with another provider you must find out your providers APN and what number to dial (normally *99#). For Tre in Sweden the APN is "bredband.tre.se".

To use the connection manager with another provider just edit the connection profile that was installed by default and change (if necessary) the number to dial and the APN. To use Tre in Sweden the profile should look like this:

 

 

Stefan Helander

Screen is displayed upside down or sideways on my laptop with Windows 7, Windows 8 or Windows 10

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Just press and hold CTRL and ALT and then press the up arrow and the screen will return to it’s normal orientation.

In order to support devices with different orientation you can rotate the screen. The screen can be rotated left (left arrow key), right (right arrow key), upside down (down key) and normal (up key) while pressing CTRL and ALT.

My guess this is going to be the next practical joke at the office 🙂

In case the keyboard shortcut doesn’t work, it can also be fixed through control panel settings described in this article.

Stefan Helander

Pimping the laptop with a Solid State Drive

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Intel Solid State diskSome week ago my laptop complained while trying to save a file that there was some error writing to the disk. I had two choices – wait until the harddisk breaks, preferably when I am overloaded with work and a deadline is coming up (that is a law of nature). Or I could buy a new disk now and replace it before disaster happens. I choose the not so adventurous way and decided to do something about it now.

I’ve been glancing at the dropping prices of Solid State Drives as they are faster than mechanical and probably lasts longer. My choice fell on the Intel X25-M 2,5″ 80 GB SSD SATA/300 MLC 34 NM from the swedish supplier called Dustin. I must mention the super quick delivery Dustin (in assistance by the swedish post) had. I ordered the device late tuesday night in their web shop. Wednesday morning around 10 i got the delivery note by mail. At 13.00 the very same the delivery guy rang my doorbell. That is impressive!

The installation was easy. Just unscrew the drive bay, uninstall the old harddisk and replace it with the SSD. Be sure not to touch the connectors of the SSD disk as it is sensetive to electric discharge. I partitioned the disk with dualboot running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS in one and Windows 7 in the other. Boot time is impressive as you can see in the videos. My laptop has a new life!