Toshiba Satellite ERROR F3E1000001

If you encounter error F3E1000001 while running your recovery disks on a Toshiba Satellite A105 or P105, it is most likely because the hard drive is BAD.

As of right now, this is not documented on Toshiba's site.

This threw up for a loop for a few minutes today- a customer's P105 came in with a bad hard drive. Our new hard drive kept giving us an error- it turned out the new hard drive was bad as well. It would show up in BIOS just fine but Windows XP Media Center Edition couldn't find it. Running DFT revealed the drive was defective. Drive #3 is in and working! Yay!

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First Citizens Bank CRASHED

Well, this is weird, but our bank just crashed.

First Citizens Bank is down. We began experiencing problems where our credit card would not work. We tried calling 1-888-FC-DIRECT and the line would say the call volume was too great and hang up. Then we tried to log into online banking but just got a message that reads "Notice to Online Banking Customers - Online Banking is currently unavailable. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you and appreciate your patience."

It has been down for hours. If it isn't fixed soon, we will not be able to process credit cards, either! There are no details on their website as to what is wrong.

October Break in

We just bumped into a pic of our front door that was smashed in back in October 2004 and thought we'd add it to our blog. The 3 people that did this didn't get away for long, they were thrown in jail a month or two later. An anonymous tipster had their license plate #. We're "prepared" for this type of situation; some of our retail inventory was stolen but no customer computers were harmed.

Sales Tax Holiday 2008 is here!

The NC Sales Tax Holiday is here again already. We will have several laptops and computers available, all tax free! We'll be open Friday until 6PM and we'll also be open this Saturday from 10AM - 2PM.

Used Dell C640 Laptops:
P4 2Ghz, 512MB RAM, 40GB HD, XP Pro, $325!

Used P3 Dell Laptops from $199 - $299!

Used IBM ThinkPad T23 Laptops:
1.1Ghz, 512MB RAM, 20GB HD, DVD/CDRW, XP Pro, $349!
(Several available. Great condition and very reliable).

Used IBM Desktop Computers:
P4 2.8Ghz, 512MB RAM, 80GB HD, CD, XP Pro, $175!
(These are fast machines! and the memory and hard drive are brand new! Add a DVDRW for +$39)

We hope to see you on Friday or Saturday at Absolute Computers!

Absolute Computers
2436 SW Cary Pkwy
Cary NC 27513
(919) 468-3999
www.AbsoluteRaleigh.com

This was also posted to our newsletter here:
http://groups.google.com/group/absoluteraleigh


More info on the Sales Tax Holiday:

Computers of $3,500 or less per item and computer supplies of $250 or less per item will be exempt August 1, 2, 3 of 2008.

Details on what else is exempt from NC State Sales Tax may be found on the NC Department od Revenue's page here:
http://www.dor.state.nc.us/taxes/sales/salestax_holiday.html

Alienware M5750 Video Card Problems

Another Alienware Area-51 M5750 came in for diagnostics this week.

Our customer needed the machine for its speed and graphics. But, yet again, the video card is defective. They just don't get adequate cooling. The unit is just over a year old and Alienware won't sell him or us a video card.

Our customer now has a $3,200.00 doorstop.

We have similar ThinkPad laptops come in- we just make a quick call, spend $200, and the next morning a video card is at our door. But not with Alienware. It appears that they had just enough cards made to sell the laptops and that is it. There are no video cards on the market for this machine.

If you want an interesting read check out this opinion article on Hexus.net here.

Sony PCV-W20 Keyboard Part Number 147752712

We had a PCV-W20 / PCVW20 computer come in this week. Coffee was spilled onto the keyboard and the keyboard was bad. Finding a replacement keyboard was difficult. The part # on the back of the keyboard was incorrect. When we finally found the correct keyboard p/n, Sony was the only place that had one and they wanted nearly $200 for it. To fix the computer we put a USB keyboard on it. The cost of the keyboard was $10.

We noticed quite a few people online are looking for this part. For all of those interested, the current correct part # for the keyboard is 147752712 (or 1-477-527-12).

Cary Computer Service & Repair Award

Some company tried to sell us this plaque (via spam email for $100). While we would probably win the award if there was one, this is just one of those companies that is selling a vanity award. It looks neat enough for a blog post though, so here it is. =)

HP ZE4145 vs. Super Glue

We had a HP ZE4145 laptop come in for our backlight repair service this week. Our customer told us that the machine worked fine one day, then the next it had no display. They could slightly see what was going on but the backlight was not lighting up.

Note: Most of the machines we get in for backlight repair actually do not need a backlight.

Anyways upon inspection we noticed the hibernate button was stuck down. Well, it wasn't just stuck down but it was glued down with some super glue.

Fortunately on this model the little hibernate button resides on it's own little board. We had the board in stock @ $29. We charged our customer our minimum labor charge and got this one back out the door. When our customer came to pick it up they told us that their 10yr old had been playing with the glue near the computer the night before it quit working which explained everything.

For more information on backlight repair please see our backlight FAQ.

iMac 24" Repair

We had an iMac 24" in this week for Data Recovery. This customer lives all the way up near VA but couldn't find anyone to work on the machine. Even with the OS corrupt we were able to retrieve the requested data from the GPT partition.

The iMac is a neat machine. We can't say we'd recommend it for everyone- it is stylish and worth around $1,900, but very proprietary. If you want to add the latest video card or DVDRW to it- it isn't going to happen- but that is not what the machine is meant for- it is just supposed to be a neat looking computer with a huge screen- or at least that was our impression of it- we're not really Mac experts over here.

Getting at the hard drive was a task- we should have documented it but didn't. If you are reading this and need disassembly instructions, well, we don't have them. Just go out and buy some suction cups prior to working on the machine.

July 4, 2008

Happy Fourth of July!

We'll be open again Monday morning (7/7/8).

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