It Is Now Safe to Turn Off Your Computer

I had an order from a customer for a nice home server, within a reasonable price range. So since I had already sold too many M2N and M2N-X motherboards, I have decided to put my trust into their bigger brother M2N-E, and I wasn't wrong of course. The specifications of the pc I've built are:

MB: Asus M2N-E nForce 570 Ultra chipset
CPU: AMD Athlon64 4000+ Dual Core
RAM: 1Gb Apacer DDR2 800MHz
HDD: 4 x Western Digital 1Tb and one ExcelStor 80Gb for the OS
OPT: Pioneer DVD-RW DVR-212 (One of the best sata dvd-rw in its class)
VGA: 6600 nVidia 128Mb
PSU: Cooler Master 850Watt Real Power

and a lot of coolers :)

So what amazed me was that when I turned off the computer in windows xp it won't shut down directly. Instead the very old and famous screen with the message: "It is now safe to turn off your computer" would appear. So the solution to this was to enable the APMS. You can do this like this:

Click Start -> Control Panel -> Performance and Maintenance -> Power Options Tab -> Select APM -> Enable Advanced Power Management Support

How to unlock your locked bios on an older laptop

Today I've had a case with an Acer Aspire 1350 which had his bios locked with a password and I couldn't boot from a cd to install windows because the boot up menu was set up to boot from hard disk first. I've tried to remove its hdd and then connect it to a different pc, install windows on it and then put it back on the laptop, but that did not work also, because of the windows protection. So after a little googling I've managed to find a code which can reset the bios password and unlock it. If you have a similar case with a locked bios and can't change the bios settings, here is what might work for you. It works with most of the old notebooks who has the same bios.

Here is the model that worked for me:

System Manufacturer: Acer Inc.
System Model: Aspire 1350
BIOS: PhoenixBIOS 4.0

Solution:

If you can't boot from the cd, Remove the hard disk from the laptop and since there is no hdd available it should boot from the cd(because the boot order in the bios is set to boot from cd if there is no hard disk)

Boot your pc in MS-DOS mode. A bootable diskette might also work, but if you don't have floppy drive, you might try with a bootable win98 or make a bootable cd with dos, just google it, you should manage to solve this)


After you get to the c:\> or c:\WINDOWS> prompt type DEBUG and then press Enter.

A hyphen(-) prompt will come up waiting for you to enter commands.

Enter the following commands, pressing Enter after each one. (Note: the o is the letter o and stands for OUTPUT).

o 70 2e

o 71 ff

q

After the q command type exit.

Restart the computer and check to see if you can enter in the bios and change the values like it should.

Dead Pixel Revived Successfully on a Samsung 710N LCD Monitor

Today we managed to revive a dead or should I say stuck pixel on a Samsung 710N monitor. I used a combination of the two best known methods.

First I've used a free software called undead pixel to cycle the RGB colors of the stuck pixel for about one hour, then I took a damp cloth, turned off the monitor, I applied pressure through the cloth with my forefinger to the area where the pixel was stuck and while applying pressure I turned on the monitor which had the undead pixel software still running, and released it after about 5 seconds after I turned the monitor on, and BOOM! The ugly red pixel was gone forever :) . I was so amazed because I was a bit skeptic about reviving pixels at lcd monitors and it was my first time I've tried this technique. The two of the methods are described more in details here at wikipedia.