Posts Tagged ‘fix’

Dell Laptop, plugged in, not charging in Vista

Monday, July 19th, 2010

My Inspiron 1525 has intermittently not been charging while plugged in. It’s gotten worse, as many intermittent problems tend to do. So, it was time for a bit of research.

It’s intermittent, so the charger generally works. I do have some battery life when it’s charged, so the charging circuits and the battery do work, though, this two year old battery doesn’t hold much power anymore.

If you search the web, it turns out to be a relatively common problem – remember, Dell sold millions of these laptops, you would expect a few problems to be reported. This laptop power connector consists of a pin in the centre of a circular connector which itself has two metal contacts, one on the inside and one on the outside of the circular ring. The inside pin is used to identify the A/C adaptor as being an authentic Dell charger. If the centre pin does not make contact with the socket on the laptop, then it will not charge; however, it will still work while plugged in.

A couple references:

– http://www.laptop-junction.com/toast/content/inside-dell-ac-power-adapter-mystery-revealed
– http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/9519-2-dell-laptop-power-jack-pinout

So, I ever so slightly bent the inside pin to the side so that it would make contact again, and it seems to be working. I’ll wonder how long it will last though.

Given how often I move my laptop around, I think it was just general wear and tear rather than a manufacturing problem. Though, I wonder if there was a legitimate purpose to the identification pin. Can an non-authentic Dell power brick really damage the battery charging circuits, while still being OK to power the laptop in “plugged in” mode?

[Edit: Hmm… upon reading some more about this, new laptops might need a way to communicate with the power brick to determine maximum power output.  If the maximum output of the transformer is too low, then the laptop can skip the battery charging to keep total power consumption down.  This also would be useful in “airplane” mode where there is a very limited amount of power from the outlet.]

Anyway, I’ve had a very similar problem happen with a cellphone charger a couple years back, so the fix wasn’t all that unique. Let’s hope that someday we can all have magnetic power connectors like the Apple guys…

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Posted in annoying | 5 Comments »

Kodak Gallery Upload Problem – “Internet connection failed”

Wednesday, June 4th, 2008

So, Future Shop and Best Buy in Canada have outsourced their digital photo processing to Kodak Gallery (which itself was formerly Ofoto).

It was time for me to develop some vacation photos.

I wasn’t about to upload 200 images one at a time, so I tried their “Kodak Gallery Upload Software”. I try to avoid installing custom software for menial jobs like this, but it’s unavoidable this time.  Some competing services have nice Java based bulk uploaders, I think Future Photo was one of them… but that’s not the point of this post.

After the quick install of “setup.exe” (why couldn’t they customize the name just a little?), I tried to login.  And I and got an error: “Internet connection failed”.

A few searches of the web, and a few retries, I was still out of luck. By fluke, I opened Internet Explorer, and noticed that it had been left in offline mode for some reason.  I use Firefox 95% of the time, except when testing web sites, and IE only websites.

Fixing IE to be “online” then trying the Kodak upload software again worked on the first try. My theory is that Kodak either reads some IE settings, or uses the IE engine in the background.  So, Kodak, kudos for trying, but you have some work to do on presenting useful error messages or documentation on the web.

Now all I have to do is be patient while the software spends the next few hours uploading my pictures…

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How I had to fix PHP PEAR

Monday, March 10th, 2008

I’ve always found the code libraries of PHP PEAR to be quite useful.

But the PEAR website and individual package documentation is often baffling. I wish users could contribute comments and sample code easily, like the online documentation of PHP.

On to today’s rant. I just upgraded the Linux distribution that runs my home server to SME7, see contribs.org. Since it’s based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, it comes with an old version of PHP Pear. Out of the box, it does not work. This is OK. On the frontpage of pear.php.net homepage the reason is clearly posted:

“[January 3, 2008] As promised, XML-RPC has been disabled at pear.php.net.”

The news post tells you how to update older installs of PEAR to work with the new system. That would be fantastic, if the instructions worked.

But they don’t. At least for older than expected versions of PEAR.

Fortunately, I have notes from earlier this year on another server upgrade I did.  I had to search high and low to get my old version of Pear working. Earlier this year, I run these commands to upgrade and fix PEAR:

pear upgrade –force http://pear.php.net/get/Archive_Tar http://pear.php.net/get/XML_Parser http://pear.php.net/get/Console_Getopt-1.2

(note, that’s all one command up there)

pear upgrade –force http://pear.php.net/get/PEAR-1.4.3.tar


pear upgrade PEAR

The difference is the Console_Getopt-1.2 line. It specifies the exact version of the Console_Getopt package to install. Shrug.

Today, I had an extra step:

On the second command, the PEAR-1.4.3.tar one, I go this error:
requires package `PEAR’ >= 1.3.3

I guessed that I needed to do a half-step upgrade first… i.e.
pear upgrade –force http://pear.php.net/get/PEAR-1.3.3.tar

Then do the original line:
pear upgrade –force http://pear.php.net/get/PEAR-1.4.3.tar

Then the final upgrade:
pear upgrade PEAR

I don’t know why PEAR had to disable the XML-RPC interface.  I don’t really care.  But I do find it annoying when the instructions on the front page of a site don’t work.

This problem will affect other people besides me. This will probably hit everyone else who is installing a new RHEL4 (or derivative) server. Long life distributions with non-functional PHP PEAR software will be kicking around for a few more years.

I’d post this on the PEAR Wiki. But there is none. Fortunately, this blog gets indexed by the search engines, so maybe it will prove useful to someone other than me.

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Posted in annoying, programming | No Comments »