silentYak » Laptop

HP, Are You Listening?

RRI — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 08:32:09 +0000

If I could give Hewlett-Packard one piece of advice about their laptops, this would be it: put as many stickers on the laptop as you want, but DON’T EVER use adhesive that doesn’t come off cleanly.

Last night, I decided to remove a bunch of colorful stickers from my laptop (HP Pavilion dv6445us) . Most of them came off easily and without much of a fuss, but the AMD64/nVidia/Broadcom and the Windows Vista ones did not. They did come off, but they left a sticky residue that stayed.

I tried everything I had — all-purpose cleaner, dish-washing detergent, cloth detergent, toothpaste, hydrogen peroxide and toilet cleaner. Nothing worked. I’ll have to find someone with nail-polish remover to see if that gets rid of the gum.

I didn’t ask for stickers. I don’t want stickers. I don’t want sticky gum on my laptop.

Two Nights And A Near Miss

RRI — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 06:19:08 +0000

I’ve had an interesting week.

I spent the whole of the last two nights in the lab, working on a Computer Architecture assignment. Normally, programming assignments don’t take long, but this one was in Verilog, that executes in different modules all at the same time. For a C or Java programmer, this is like debugging a highly multi-threaded program that is eagerly waiting to jump into infinite loops.

The program finally worked. Enough said about that.

I also almost lost all the data on my laptop. I tried to delete a couple of unwanted partitions, and strangely, my data partition also disappeared. Identifying the lost partition using dd, fdisk and hexdump was possible, but not practical. Finally, I tried something called R-Linux that miraculously restored my partition. Ironically, I easily managed to recover the partitions that I had actually wanted to delete — and that too without any specialized software. Oh well, everything is back to normal now.

And before anyone says it, I refuse to back up my data.

Once Upon A Dream

RRI — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 13:22:18 +0000

Dreams are, perhaps, the best form of entertainment. The brain comes up with a story and narrates it to you, and in most cases, you can actually participate as a key character in the story. The plot is never boring — the brain would change the plot if it were. Pray, where else could you get access to a three-dimensional movie of this kind?

I had a dream last night. Perhaps it had something to do with my recent purchase of a laptop, because this was precisely what I was doing in my dream. Not an actual purchase, but I had a large box with the notebook in it, and I was lugging it around, presumably to get it home.

The twist was that in my forgetfulness, I kept leaving it behind at different locations — a classroom, on the road and so on — and each time, I walked back anxiously looking for it. When I left it behind somewhere on the road and then went back to hunt for it, it was returned to me by a passerby — but now the laptop was no longer packaged, and my name was printed (not written, printed) on it.

The good news is that I did get it “home” finally, although I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a house in real life.