Don’t Freeze Your Laptop

November 9, 2010 by Leave a Comment
Schlieren texture on PSP's LCD screen when vie...
Image via Wikipedia

Freezing Your Laptop Screen

As the name implies, your laptop’s display screen has liquid – it’s a liquid-crystal display, or LCD, to be exact. And yes, the LCD screen can freeze if it gets too cold. When you purchase your laptop (or LCD television) there will be a user guide that gives you the specific temperatures at which the display will work, literally freeze up, or even melt down. If the liquid crystals in the screen get to around thirty below zero, they may be permanently damaged. Nine times out of ten the clear plastic display screen will crack, and when you attempt to boot up the device, you just get a white screen and nothing else. Since LCDs are in almost everything these days – cameras (the display on the back), mobile phones, mobile game systems, and all computer monitors (pure cathode ray display screens are no longer produced), you should be familiar with how cold can kill your LCD.

Don’t Leave It In Your Car

If you freeze your laptop, usually by forgetting it in your car overnight, the best thing to do is try to let it warm up inside before you boot up. If the display is going to recover, shocking it with heat will not help. Do not, as some have done, attempt to warm up your frozen laptop in a microwave oven. Don’t put it in a regular oven. Don’t use a hairdryer on it. Let it warm up to room temperature gradually. Once it’s at room temperature, boot it up. If you only see a white light, that’s bad. LCDs don’t illuminate themselves, since the liquid crystals aren’t luminescent. There’s a white cold cathode tube behind the screen that projects light through the display. So if you see only white light coming from the display, the crystals are not energizing because they got too cold, and cracked their containment case.

Enhanced by Zemanta
Filed Under: Technology Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Touchpad Wear and Tear

November 7, 2010 by Leave a Comment
LAS VEGAS - JANUARY 07: A Hanvon Touchpad, an...
Image by Getty Images via @daylife

A touchpad (or trackpad) is the most commonly-used pointing device on laptops. Since the touchpad is built into the device, in front of the keyboard, it doesn’t need any desk space or even a flat surface to allow the user to move the cursor around the screen. The first trackpad came out for retail use in 1994 with an Apple PowerBook. Since then, besides laptops, they’ve been incorporated into PDAs, cameras, and many mobile devices where cursors are needed by there’s no room for a mouse. Touchpads (as they’ve come to be known) use either capacitive sensing or conductive sensing to determine where a fingertip is, and then translate the two-dimensional grid information into the cursor’s movement. Modern touchpads mostly use the grounding effect of a person’s touch, which is why some laptops have problems with their touchpads when plugged into power supply units with built-in grounds.

Touchpad Wear-Out Syndrome

The touchpad, with no moving parts, is extremely durable. However, people use their laptops so much that they’ve encountered a problem that engineers haven’t foreseen: users commonly call it ‘touchpad wear-out syndrome.’ The symptoms include: flaky and inconsistent cursor movements, and a lack of response to human fingers on the touchpad. One problem can be caused by the aforementioned ground effect – a laptop that uses electrical grounding for conductive sensing on the touchpad might need to be plugged into a power strip instead of a power supply unit. Also, the touchpad can get dirty from constant use. Cleaning it up per the manufacturer’s guidelines is suggested. The last problem is the worst – the sensors beneath the touchpad lose their conductivity, and stop working. Since the touchpad is an integral part of the computer, you better hope your warrantee is up to date (or not yet expired). The only option in that case is to plug in a USB mouse.

Enhanced by Zemanta
Filed Under: Internet Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Printer Tech

November 2, 2010 by Leave a Comment
Cutaway drawing, illustration of an inkjet printer
Image via Wikipedia

printers: better, cheaper, smaller

cyber warfare for citizens

Cheaper, Better Printers to Come

The types of printers for the home market have pretty much stabilized into three areas: Pure black-and-white using toner cartridges, which form the best way to create text papers, inkjet cartridges for color projects and art design, and inkjets using photograph paper for printing out high-quality photographic images. The three printer types are common because their components (the toner, the inkjets, and the photographic paper) all range in price, from cheap and easy to expensive. Printers themselves have come way, way down in price in the past five years, so that the cheapest inkjet printers are generally cheaper than the toner ones. However, toner last longer and is still far cheaper than inkjet replacements. (For those unfamiliar with inkjet cartridges, you need to buy blue, red, green, and black cartridges for your machine, instead of one toner cartridge.)

The Future of Home Printers

Only fifteen years ago it was nearly impossible for a home to have anything but a dot-matrix printer in it at best; the price was simply out of reach. However, today the question is – where do we put all our printers? Combination machines are the most popular approach, and now you can buy a printer that has a scanner, an inkjet machine, a photographic paper printer, and a fax machine – all in one. Inkjet and toner combination machines are also an attractive option. Home printers have nearly put the film processing microlabs out of business; now you just print out your pictures. But the future of print technology can barely be called print. Now, printers that turn Styrofoam and plastic blocks into three-dimensional models are being developed for home use. The 3D printers will be able to craft custom toys right at home. In the near future, ‘printers’ will be making things that really jump right off the page.

Enhanced by Zemanta
Filed Under: Internet Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Laptops, Fire, and You

October 26, 2010 by Leave a Comment
Panasonic Toughbook CF-M34 (Rugged computer)
Image via Wikipedia

Reminder: Hot Laptops can Burn You

It’s almost embarrassing to say it, but many people in the United States and Europe are being burned by their laptops. No, the computers aren’t exploding in their users’ face, or spontaneously combusting and catching people on fire. The laptops are burning people because they leave hot laptops on their thighs for so long that the heat can redden, dry, and irritate the skin. Doctors have had to publish their cases of ‘toasted skin syndrome’ and expose the danger that most people would think common sense could avoid. After all, if your laptop is hot – move it, right? Not so fast, say experts, who advise that warning labels be put on laptops to advise their users on how not to burn themselves with a hot computer. Laptops have a microprocessor in them that gets to over 110 degrees. If the laptop’s vents are clogged or blocked because they’re on someone’s leg, the temp can get to over 125.

How to Prevent Laptop Burns

The toasted skin syndrome was first documented in 1994, when laptops first came out, but not until the recent expansion in the use of laptops have people started burning themselves in vast numbers. Usually toasted skin syndrome turns the skin brown and gives it a mottled appearance, and it goes away after awhile, healing like a sunburn. The processor on a laptop has vents at the bottom of the computer. These vents have to be able to have good access to fresh air. There are laptop spacers you can purchase for a few bucks that you put your laptop into, and it always keeps that air gap even if you’re using the laptop on a pillow. If your laptop becomes uncomfortable, make sure you get it away from your skin, even if you’re in the middle of a serious fight on a video game.

Enhanced by Zemanta
Filed Under: Technology Tagged With: , , , , , , ,