Dealing with iPhone power-on issues

If your iPhone is not turning on or getting locked during the power-on process, give these few things a try.

One of the first things you should generally try when your iPhone is misbehaving and won't turn on properly is a hard-reset.  Hold the Home button and the Power button down at the same time for 10 seconds.  This will get you out of an amazingly large amount of fixes.

One common infuriating issue we hear about with the iPhones is that the phone will suddenly not boot normally but only get to a silver Apple logo.  When this happens, you pretty much have to follow the instructions below to get back into the swing of things:

To fix (you have to restore, it is the only way to get it back):
1. Hold the home and power button until your screen goes off.
2. Start iTunes on your Mac and plug your iPhone's USB cable into your Mac (just the cable, not the phone too).
3. Connect the iPhone to the USB connecting cable while holding down the home button until you see the icon telling you to connect to iTunes.
4. Your iPhone will show up in iTunes and will be in Recovery mode. Release the Home button at this point.  From iTunes click restore and when the restore process is done choose setup as new iPhone. Do not restore from backup. You will have to resynch your phone with your iTunes library and may have to reload apps.  We'll look further into this to see if you can restore the backup after doing the restore process.

You may have also heard about trying DFU mode. This can be used to downgrade or replace your iPhone's firmware with a specific firmware file that you have downloaded.  Very similar to recovery mode, but your phone connects to iTunes without loading it's OS.  Check out these instructions here:  http://www.iclarified.com/entry/index.php?enid=1034.  We need to investigate further how best to use DFU, but we understand that there are various options available when you hold down "Shift" or "Option" as you click on the "Restore" button in iTunes.  Google this to get more details.

Another problem is that the iPhone only displays a battery with a thin red slice and the lightning bolt, but is not actually charging and never gets beyond this point.  When this happens,  you need to turn off the iPhone, allow it to charge from either the wall charger or directly from the high-powered USB port on your computer for 10 to 30 minutes (not from the keyboard or a hub; they don't have enough power), and then turn back on.  Most likely, you'll now be showing that the battery is charging.

You may find the troubleshooting tips on Apple's site minimally helpful: http://www.apple.com/support/iphone/assistant/phone/#section_1

Daryn

Pretty Freakin' Hot!

We've gotten in some laptops lately that have run pretty freakin' hot. One of the big problems tends to start with the basic design of most laptop computers. The cooling fan tends to draw air in from the bottom of the computer, often through a single hole or rectangular slotted area, and then discharges the hot air through some holes or slots on the side or back.

All this works fine, usually, until you actually use the laptop. If the laptop is on your lap, or on the bed or carpet, or some other flat surface that reduces air flow from the bottom, then the CPU and GPU lose their ability to shed heat and they get hot, upwards of 150 degrees!

Another design problem is that dust and fiber is sucked into the cooling fan and sent toward the cooling fins from the CPU/GPU heat sink. These tend to be slotted areas that maximize surface area and therefore heat dissipation, but the slots through which the air must travel are very narrow and the dust and fiber collects on the inside of the cooling fin surface, between the fins and the fan, right where you can't get to it. 

We've seen two in the past couple of days that had so much crap collected in the cooling fan and heat sink fins that there were literally dust bunnies in there that prevented the fan from turning. In a situation like this, there is not much choice but to disassemble the notebook computer to the point where you can remove the heat sink and cooling fan and clean it out properly, using a brush, compressed air and possibly a pipe cleaner to help remove caked on dust from the fan blades.

You'll also find that many GPU, or graphics chips, have a foam pad that serves as the connection between the GPU and the surface of the heat sink. These don't work so well and tend to cause eventual failure of the connections between the graphics card and the motherboard. When this happens, you may just lose part or all of your video display, or your computer may fail to start altogether. We can correct this by replacing the foam spacer pad with solid copper shims that make much better contact and transfer heat significantly more effectively.  (If you research it, you may find that some manufacturer's like HP and Dell have had lawsuits against them to correct manufacturing defects like this.  Your warranty coverage for this particular issue may be extended.)

The installation of the shims is a tough sell. Generally, it is best to install them BEFORE you have problems, but we'll generally never see a computer that hasn't already exhibited problems. Still, we can hope that customers will bring in their computers when they first notice that they are getting abnormally hot but have not failed yet. We can do something to repair the issue at that point. Wait too long and there is no choice but to send off the motherboard to have the GPU or BGA (ball grid array) replaced and or reflowed in order to repair the overheated components.

Daryn

A Pain in the Aluminum A**

Can I just say it? We're not fans of the aluminum MacBook construction. 


What a pain in the butt to switch out the keyboard. If somehow it all equated to protecting your system from spills, we'd understand, but it doesn't. Lots of tape everywhere that is useless once you pull it off. We figured out that the touchpad and clicker are even installed using double-sided adhesive tape. The surface of the palmrest is connected to the frame of the palmrest with an array of microwelds, which work great until they start to come loose. Then, they can fail in quick succession.

Anway, we had a devil of a time getting the keyboard's ribbon cable stuck back into the connector on the underside of the touchpad. It pulled free fairly easily and we were too confident in our skills to go check out a video or one of the sites out there that has photos and instructions. After struggling with it a bit and not doing anything other than bending up the end of the ribbon cable a bit, we finally figured out that there is a flap along the BACK side of the connector (opposite of the end where the ribbon cable inserts) that has to be rolled up with your fingernail or spunger, and that released the tension in the pins on the inside of the connector and allowed the ribbon cable to be inserted. We still also used a razor with tape over the sharp edge so we could hold it under the cable and maintain pressure against it on the top side we we slid the ribbon cable into the connector. That definitely helped to stabilize it, despite the fact that it had folded a bit in our previous struggles.

You can sometimes get the new replacement keyboards from Triangle Laptops here. 
The devil's in the details...


Daryn

Dang those fatal errors...

We've run into an issue a couple of times recently where we have slaved over a laptop, creating a very up-to-date image starting with a manufacturer's restore CD that includes Windows XP Service Pack 3, all the latest security updates, Firefox, Microsoft Security Essentials, etc. Ready to go, ready to sysprep so we can legally register and activate the existing COA key on the target computer.

Problem is, we get the following error upon formatting a hard drive and restoring the saved sysprepped image to it using Norton Ghost:

"Fatal Error: An error has been encountered that prevents Setup from continuing.

Windows is unable to start because the registry could not be updated. To address this problem, please contact your computer manufacturer. Windows must now Shut Down.

Press OK to view the Setup log file."

At this point, we're pretty well screwed. There is nothing to do but to start over. Very, very disappointing. Microsoft explains the issue here, and offers the solution of limiting the image to only include Service Pack 1. Sure, whatever. Like that accomplishes the final goal of saving a quality image that is ready to go?

The overwhelming solution that we've seen is to delete the files that show up in C:WINDOWS\system32\Microsoft\Protect\S-1-5-18 and its User subdirectory. You'll need to unhide files in order to see these protected system files.

When we reinstalled from a different manufacturer's XP install that included Service Pack 3, we found that the aforementioned S-1-5-18 folder and the User folder within it were both empty, despite the fact that the Windows installation had already been activated. We'll give this a try and report on the success of our new sysprep image. We'll be sure to save an image of the drive before running sysprep, though. We'll also double check that the version of SYSPREP that we have is from the Service Pack 3 install, per suggestions that we've seen out there.

Eeek.

LoJacking Laptops!

If you own a laptop, it's probably occurred to you that some fateful day, you might just lose it, or worse, have it taken from you. There have been a number of recent thefts, for example, in our own neck of the woods, and if you're like most people, your LIFE is on your laptop. Its loss represents a substantial amount of pain and anguish, not to mention a lot of hair pulling and heart pounding should the worst happen.

So what can you do about it?

The Computer Cellar offers lo-jacking services.

Believe it or not, there are services and software available to "lo-jack" your computer. The software basically works like an alarm service:  software is installed on your computer that will connect you to a monitoring service at a remote location. Should your laptop go missing, you notify them and the police (required, apparently), and the monitoring team "pings" your computer every 15 minutes in an effort to locate it. 

In addition, some manufacturers of laptops now offer security services to their customers. Dell is one, their service being called ProSupport Service. And Apple users now have options as well, from Absolute Software. They offer a contract-based service for Macs.

It does conjure up images of a virtual swat team rushing in to save the day, but these days, with so much information in one place, and on something so portable, it's worth considering.

Come in for a free 15-minute diagnostic, and talk to us about Lo-Jacking!