Toshiba Satellite 5000 USB not working & BIOS issues

One client brought in his Toshiba Satellite 5000 notebook because his USB ports were not working. After updating some unknown Windows drivers that turned out to be drivers for the SDCard we focused our efforts on the BIOS. Unfortunately it turns out that the Satellite 5000 doesn't have a standard BIOS. The BIOS on the Satellite 5000 is accessed through a program called HWSetup.exe on Windows. We figured that the USB might be disabled in the BIOS since all the drivers looked fine in Windows.

The next problem was that the client had installed a non-original version of Windows XP on his Toshiba notebook, which meant that the utility wasn't present. We scoured toshiba.ca to no avail., only finding the utility on toshiba.com. When we ran the Toshiba Utilities installer which installs the HWSetup.exe file along with a few other tools we got an error message about another Toshiba Common Files utility which wasn't installed. More searching on Toshiba.

The point here is keep your original CD and if your notebook is new make sure you make any Windows restore utilities as per the documentation before starting to use your notebook. In the long run it will save you a lot of time and expense.

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Canon BJ-30 Bubble Jet Printer

A few days ago we received a Canon BJ-30 Bubble jet printer as part of a group of printer donations. We tested this tiny printer which measures about 1 foot wide by 1/2 foot long when the lid is closed. Amazingly the donated printer still contained ink. Sadly it seems that Canon has discontinued making any drivers or information for Windows available on their web site. We tested the printer under Ubuntu Linux version 10.04 and it printed a test page flawlessly (we even got a full tank of ink). I called our favourite ink re-filler and found that the do indeed still carry the cartridges for this portable printer. We looked around for information about the BJ-30 and discovered that this tiny printer is 720dpi x 360 dpi, although we suspect that number is a software-interpolation number that depends on a Windows driver. As anyone can see from our screen shot above the printer seems to print just fine. The biggest downside to the printer we felt was the lack of a USB port, and the

Considering Godaddy hosting?

I've been a Godaddy customer for several years. When I first signed on with Godaddy their hosting was reasonably efficient and very affordable. While the afford-ability has stayed the same the quality of hosting has dropped magnitudes. Godaddy simply hasn't been a good host now for several years, and it simply isn't worth the "affordable" price anymore because of the lack of stability. What am I talking about? Regular 500 Internal Server Errors resulting from the servers simply being overloaded. Godaddy just can't handle their success and as a result has commodified everything to the point where their offerings are just crap. If the site's not available most of the time it isn't worth the money, no matter how little you spend.

Update: Linux Laptops, desktop computers.

Much has changed since the last post was originally posted here. The biggest change is the Computer Recycling project has started selling AS-IS Linux Laptops. All laptops go through several stages (not necessarily in this order): Evaluation Testing Wiping Linux Installation Cataloguing/Processing All laptops are sold AS-IS with no warranty. This brings up the obvious question "why even test/wipe systems?" if you're just going to sell them AS-IS. The answer is a combination of things: We rely completely on donations, Computer Recycling doesn't buy equipment through vendors or anywhere else (we simply don't have the budget to do this). Much of the equipment is difficult to get parts for. Laptops tend to be very proprietary - two laptops with the exact same model number may have a different keyboard connector depending on the date and factory they were manufactured in (we've actually seen this when we tried replacing a particular laptop keyboard).

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