A customer recently came to me after an unhelpful, incorrect and ultimately expensive experience at PC World.

Their Dell Inspiron laptop had stopped working, after initially refusing to look at it, the ‘tech’ person grudgingly agreed after a complaint to his manager. After being told it was thought the power supply had stopped working, he took it away and ultimately concluded the motherboard needed replacing.

Of course it didn’t and just needed another power supply which was less than £20.00 for a recycled one on eBay!

Unfortunately the customer had already bought another laptop on this expert’s advice which she didn’t need. Please don’t go to PC World for advice!

Health Designs, a local business offering:

… a supportive and down to earth approach to health and wellbeing which can be applied to individuals, therapists, organisations and schools.

is finally live, proudly designed and hosted by us.

This is a standards compliant site powered by the open source content management system, Drupal.

A lot of hard work went into the theme design that’s based on the blank canvas Zen theme. I think we’re all happy with it now, I hope..

Just recently I’d been asked to repair what seems to be a common problem with PC type laptops over a couple of years old. Dust gets trapped in the copper fins and the fan of the CPU heatsink and reduces the efficiency of the cooling resulting in regular power off’s by the laptop as it gets over it’s upper temperature setting.

The fix is relatively easy, remove the heatsink unit, blow it clean with compressed air, clean the old CPU heatsink paste off with isopropyl alcohol (IPA) and spread a thin but even film of good quality heatsink paste on the CPU. Put it all back together, keep your fingers crossed and it should be fine!

This has fixed several laptops permanently and with this Advent I could go ahead and wipe the old Windows XP Home from it and install Ubuntu 8.04 that’s fantastic and  installs perfectly without any ‘geeking around’ necessary. My only problem is the fan control from linux, but that’s another story……

Recently a customer sent me a VHS tape for transfer which looked like this:

I didn’t even attempt to play it in my machines as I didn’t want to be cleaning the transport all day but I did find an interesting U.S. based company that specialises in restoration of very damaged video tape.

http://www.videointerchange.com/video_recovery.htm

I have no direct experience of this company but from their site they seem very knowledgeable and can transfer some very, very obscure formats from the past.

Growing up in the 1970’s and 80’s I had a lot of these and still do but they’re covered in my scrawly handwriting unlike the fine collection here:

http://zabava.septem.cz/Blbustky/obrazky/kazety/

I think this is originally form a Japanese site that ‘disappeared’ from the web some time ago - it’s nice to see it back anyway! I’m tempted to do my own version with the huge piles of tapes I own and love and have collected recently.

I don’t know where it came from but the green and blue style is everywhere at the moment. You must have seen it - a bright lime green and a clean ultramarine type blue. 

Here’s a good example of it - http://www.joomlashack.com/

I’m not even sure if I like it anymore, it’s almost become a ‘blue and red’ type design but not as blunt and common in the Tesco, Screwfix, National Express kind of way.