Monthly Archives: July 2006

Yet more reasons to love Ubuntu.

By | Published: July 25, 2006
My Dell laptop has had an issue for some time. It's not a major one for me, just a bit of a niggle. Problem is it doesn't suspend properly. Well to be exact it doesn't come back after it suspends properly. I've had this problem for a while, but haven't really been bothered by it because I rarely need to suspend my laptop. It generally stays on. Some time ago at a HantsLUG meeting, I showed the laptop to Paul Sladen who valiantly tried to figure out why this happened, in amongst lots of other people asking him questions. It was a bit of a tricky one so he filed a bug on the Ubuntu Bug tracking system. I had already registered so in fact all he had to do was open a browser on my laptop and point to the right place to start the bug reporting process. It was very quick and easy to do.
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Some wierd bloke spoke to me on the train

By | Published: July 20, 2006
That would be me. I've started speaking to strangers more. Here's what's happened so far. A couple of weeks ago I spoke to a guy standing on the concourse at London Waterloo station. He was standing with an electrically powered bike. When I approached him and asked what it was, how it worked and so on, he seemed somewhat taken aback. After telling me all about the bike and his adventures on it we moved on to talk about Brookwood Cemetary and the special train that used to take the dead and mourners there from London. I learned that you had to buy a one-way ticket for the casket - which makes total sense, but I'd never thought about it.
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Joined up Dell support

By admin | Published: July 20, 2006
(not) I previously blogged about the problem with the video card on my Dell laptop. On the Friday I called Dell up having had no response from their website. They talked me through some tests which included reinstalling the device driver in Windows and reinstalling Windows itself. Neither of these I could do as I [...]
Posted in Advocacy | 5 Comments

My broken Dell Laptop part 2

By admin | Published: July 10, 2006
Last wednesday I notcied X had locked up. I thought this might be a software problem so I tried a few things like changing video driver from the binary nvidia to the open source nv driver. I also did a full 24 hour memory test. The screen corruption still occured however. I sent a message to Dell via their website late on Thursday night. By 12pm Friday I had no reply, in fact no confirmation email of my message so I called them up. After calling 2 different support numbers (gleaned from the website) I was told there's a special number to call dedicated for Dell XPS systems - of which mine is one. I got through to a human being pretty quickly who started asking me questions about the problem. I pointed the guy at my gallery so he could see the problem for himself.
Posted in Ubuntu | 9 Comments

Menu

By | Published: July 8, 2006
Laura stumbled across a shocking example of web design - as if I can talk! ;) . Two words for you Laura: Microsoft FrontPage. It does bad things to people.
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment