Our Next Meeting: Wednesday 18th July "Scanning Evening:All

This should be quite interesting because we have not had an evening on scanning for several years, except for the quick foray into the USB microscope after the AGM. The microscope should make a reappearance more successfully this time. Also I am expecting to show the Nikon Coolscan III film scanner in operation and also the Epson Perfection 1660 flatbed scanner. This will all be rather hands on so if you have anything you would like scanned and perhaps printed then bring it along. I hope there will also be some other contributions,

Peter

Our Last Meeting : Wednesday 20th June: "PC and Mac Tips and Tricks"

Sadly this meeting was only attended by me with no apologies except Gareth who was in USA. Michael apologised later. So there is no report of the meeting this month. I had intended to put together a few tips for the Mac as a relatively new user but maybe we can do this another time.

I have this month had a few computer problems at home involving having to rebuild my wife's laptop, which developed a rather strange fault in losing access to the hard drive. It disappeared from the BIOS and gave out strange messages about unplugged cables and a Realtek internet controller PXE - E61 media failure. It also claimed to have lost the operating system and would not boot into windows.

I did a bit of digging on the internet and decided that the drive might be faulty. The laptop is a Toshiba P10 running XP SP3, which has an 8GB ATA drive MK8025GAS-(PM). I decided to recover files from the laptop drive first so I downloaded a KNOPPIX Linux Live disk with which I was able to access all the files on the hard drive and copy them over to an external USB drive. Having done this I used the recovery disks which came with the laptop to reinstall windows XP SP1. This gave rise to a few problems in that it would not update to SP2 and SP3 automatically, and since the website wanted a newer version than IE5 and I could not install the latest version manually because it would not download to an XP SP1 OS. I eventually managed to load a slightly newer IE which would allow me to download SP2. I had to use the only version available online,which is a network version for developers, since MS are no longer supporting XP after 2013 and SP2 ended in 2010. Having put XP SP2 on the machine I was then able to get IE8 and Firefox and get automatic update of XP SP3. I thought I was home and dry but I needed to get the wireless card working again as I had done all the previous downloads with a wired Ethernet connection. I found it wouldn't connect to my WPA Homehub ... no error messages, just did nothing.

The next day I thought I would look around for an updated driver for the wireless card since I couldn't find another driver in my backup files. Next day when I turned on the laptop it once more refused to boot into Windows and the drive had disappeared again with the same error messages. This time it would not even run with KNOPPIX. So I bought a 2.5" external caddy and removed the laptop hard drive and used it externally to my desktop and using Acronis

True Image 2012 I cloned the drive (which then worked) onto another USB external drive. I then looked online and purchased a replacement MK8025GAS-(PM) drive with which I was then able to rebuild the replacement drive by cloning the backed up copy to it again using Acronis True Image 2012. This I then replaced into the laptop and away we went with a working PC with XP SP3.

I still had the problem of the wireless card not running WPA and had a look for a new driver.

After a few more Google searches a I got one and downloaded it but still couldn't get WPA to work. WPA was only introduced with SP2 onwards anyway, but I thought it should work with XP SP3. Then I discovered you have to uninstall the hardware and reinstall it, having done this it burst into life and ran iwth an older driver I had not found beforea instead of the newer one!

I have since added 1GB memory to improve the performance. I need to get the old drive checked, if it is O.K. then it might be a useful clone backup for the future. In doing all this I found some quite useful free online demos of how to dismantle the Toshiba. I am still puzzled about the original fault which had a certain degree of intermittency about it. It might be temperature related. I still need to reinstall some emails in Thunderbird which again has been awkward to set up again. It won't recognise our original account and password, I think it is something to do with mail validation for BTinternet. Anyone any ideas?

I hope you found some of the above interesting, I learnt quite a bit from it. It was worth keeping an old machine not suitable for Windows 7 going for a bit I think and user was happy!

The user has since acquired an ipad 3, but still enjoys using Freecell on the laptop.

Peter