24 Jul 2009

Fujitsu laptop keboard replaced

In case you were wondering whether I bought a new 'extreme rugged laptop' after my son ruined the keyboard of our old laptop, the answer is No!. They are extremely expensive and out of our budget. In fact you could probably buy 2 or 3 good laptops with the same price.

Fauzan, a tech wiz friend of mine was visiting us for tea with his family and I happened to mention my laptop problem. He had a look at it and told me that I could fix it myself. I couldn't really believe it until he actually showed me how.

In case you are wondering, my laptop is a Fujitsu Lifebook S7021.

A couple of days later I bought a brand new keyboard from eBay for only £30.


The one out of order is on top.

So it was DIY repair time.



First of all I had to remove the battery from the back and remove 4 screws holding the panels in the top front.



Without the keyboard, the laptop looks quite odd. Fauzan had already taken off the keyboard when he was in my house last time, so made it easier for me. I found out that if you break the keyboard connectors, you actually have to change the whole mother board, so don't do this unless you know how to.


The panel at the top came out quite easily after releasing the plastic latches.



Connect the keyboard to the keyboard connector carefully and then push down the connector locks. We had to lift them before we disconnected.



Putting back the panel at the top and then screwing it back in took less then 2 minutes.

At the same time, I also upgraded the RAM to 2 GB. Previously it was only 512MB. The laptop now works perfectly.

It was great fun and I probably saved around £100 as well.

20 Jul 2009

Bye Bye Geocities

I recently received an email from Yahoo saying that "GeoCities is closing." Geocities users won't be able to access their accounts after October 26, 2009.

I joined this free web site building service and community way back in 1998 and built my first web site on it. The site was about my favourite places, my attempts at poetry, photographs, my research on pines and favourite links. It also had an "Environmental" page talking about my concern about Mother Earth.



At that time Geocities was one of the most popular sites on the Web and We had a real sense of community then. I was really fond of their Page builder interface which let amateurs like me get a feel of designing web pages without using html. I did eventually learnt html and later CSS. Designing my pages by trial and error was really frustrating and exciting at the same time. My web site would often disappear completely or appear as a mass of strange coding.

I guess Yahoo never really harnessed the full potential of Geocities like Google did with Blogger. I mean, even after more than 10 years, it was almost the same. No user friendly innovations or updates. I guess one reason for the decline was the growing popularity of blogs especially blogger with their blogspot blogs. I got tired of static sites and hardly updated my Geocities site. I cannot even recall the last time I actually visited it but I still left it online as most of my old friends found me via the site.

I will definitely miss Geocities.

Does anyone else have fond memories of Geocities?

15 Jul 2009

Moving from Talk Talk to O2 broadband

I have not been updating my blogs for a while. No! I haven't been struck down by Swine flu. It's because I don't have any Internet access at home right now. Hopefully that will change tomorrow when I get reconnected to the net again with 02 broadband. It''s been really hard and I sometimes wonder how we managed without any Internet access in the past.

I have been with Talk Talk for a while. They are now the UK's largest resident broadband provider and second overall behind BT. Not surprising because they are the cheapest. The broadband connection came free with the telephone line. Even though, I had actually called them the worst broadband provider in the past, their service had improved tremendously. However, even though it was cheap, we were looking for a more reliable internet service provider.

Initially we were thinking of Virgin broadband and their claims of super-fast cable braodband connections were really tempting. However, after reading customer reviews on various sites, we finally decided on O2. Apaarantly O2 has the most satisfied customers in the whole of UK. First of all we had to change to a BT line which was activated last Friday. On the same day, we were in the Coventry city centre and decided to get a Pay-as-you-go O2 sim card. This is because the Internet connection is cheaper if you are a O2 customer (good marketing).

Anyway while we were there we noticed that we could actually sign up and get the O2 router in the shop. Moreover they were having a broadband promotion as well and we won't have have the initial two months free plus a discount on the initial sign up fee.

At first it looked like we were outside their normal coverage area and would have to pay more for what they call the "O2 Home Broadband Access package" but when we got home and called up to activate the connection, we actually found out that they were going to extend their coverage area, meaning that we won't have to pay for the alternative Broadband Access package and there would be no problems moving down to the lower rate (I sincerely hope so).

Will be posting about my initial experiences with O2 broadband tomorrow.