Spring 2006 video card review

Tom's Hardware has quite a line up, reviewing 27 graphics cards.

It is good to see so much competition. Well, usually, today SGI (Silicon Graphics, Inc.) filed Chapter 11...

The Tom's Hardware review is here.

How to Remove Vundo Trojan

A lot of people are seeing their antivirus scanners detecting and not removing he "Vundo Trojan".

Antispyware software is needed to remove it.

You have to disable system restore, install antispyware utilities such as spybot, shut down, boot into safemode and start scanning and removing.

We were going to make a step by step of this, but above is the short version. =)

12.8 Million GB in 1 square cm?

The title says it all.

Read the full story here.

Laptop power problems- battery related?

A question we hear often is:
Are my laptop power problems battery related?

Often when laptops start having power problems, they have a faulty power jack. Below are the answers to some frequently asked questions we get here:

Can a laptop run if the battery is dead?
Yes. Even if the battery is dead your laptop should power up. Don't waste money troubleshooting your laptop by buying a new battery.

Should I run my laptop with no battery installed?
No. There is a lot of bad information about this on the Internet. Most of it is very outdated or flat out WRONG.

My laptop powers up and shuts off immediately. Why?
99% of the time the unit is trying to power up from battery and the battery is dead. Many people find this hard to beleive or swear the battery is charged, but they drain for various reasons. If the unit is plugged in, the charger is bad, or more likely, the power connector is broken. More about that below.

Usually if you are experiencing a power problem, your laptop has a bad power jack. This is very common in Compaq/HP, Toshiba and Sony laptops.

Details about our laptop power jack repair services may be found here:
absoluteraleigh.com/power_jack_repair.html.

ZE2000 Repair, AbsoluteRaleigh VS another shop

Here in Raleigh there is a chain of stores that hires the cheapest technicians they an find. We get one of their customers almost DAILY.

A customer had been quoted by them $500 to repair her HP ZE2000 laptop computer. She paid them the $65 diagnostic fee and left. Good choice! She went home and searched for local laptop repair and found us. She also found out about our power jack repair services.

For $149 her laptop was brought back to life as good as new.

Power jacks are fragile in this model and we plan on seeing a lot of them in the near future.

Not only was the price better, so was the service. We have special soldering and rework tools that we use here daily. The other store grabs $8 tools at the local electronics store and hopes the repair will work!

X40 Motherboard Replacement

A TinkPad X40 came in for repair last week. The unit was well tken care of but couldn't POST. It tried but was stuck in an endless loop of rebooting. We diagnosed it with a bad system board (it needed a motherboard replacement).

Our customer was very skeptical when we quoted him since he had been quoted $975 to get it repaied elsewhere. However, specializing in laptops has given us a major edge and we obtained a bran new X40 board, installed at under $500.

IBM ThinkPad R40 Repair and nice Upgrade

An IBM ThinkPad R40 laptop came in this week, kind of. It was actually in about 35 peices.

The owner had come into our store looking to purchase a similar ThinkPad. A tech asked him what was wrong with the R40. The AC adapter tip was melted. We quickly realized the R40 had a power jack problem and may be rescued. We like to sell laptops but we talked this customer out of buying one and he gave us a couple of days to test the R40.

The R40's original power jack had gone bad. We replaced it with our standard power jack repair service.

Out customer was thrilled. He noted he wanted the machine to be faster. He also wished it could record CDs. He was also looking for a wireless card for the machine. This particular R40 was a 2Ghz Celeron. We upgraded that to a P4M 2Ghz CPU, greatly increasing the machine's speed. We replaced the defective AC adapter. We upgraded his DVD player to a DVD/CDRW Combo drive. We informed him the R40 was wireless ready (meaning there are wireless antannae inside the laptop) and upgraded the unit to internal wireless.

The entire bill was under $400 and the ThinkPad is up and running better than new!

Toshiba A75 power problems FIXED.

A Toshiba A75 laptop power problems?

An A75 came in this week citing various power issues. It would show a power light and run ok but suddenly switch to battery power only and not go back to charging until powered off. In addition, the screen was going out and the power cord was getting rather hot.

This one made it in just in time- a little more use could have fried the motherboard. After some testing we concluded this laptop's power problems were due to a faulty power jack. This fell under our standard power jack repair. The laptop was fixed, up and running in no time.

This A75 was a nice machine w/ a glossy, widescreen LCD, a DVDRW, internal wireless and several other nice features.

FIXED!

New AMD laptop for $229

You will need to add a CPU, memory & OS. It is an AMD based notebook by ECS that weighs in @ 10lbs. These are likely overstock the geeks purchased. ECS is known for making cheap products. We may buy a couple to play with here. While supplies last they're here.

AbsoluteRaleigh's Blog with RSS

Eventually a link will be added but if anyone wants to get our blog's feed now:
http://www.absoluteraleigh.com/blog/atom.xml

Report Spam pages to Google

Another great idea by Google... Especially since there are so many spam pages on the net... Report em to Google here:
http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html