Hacks and Gadgets by HJL

This evening I started having the same problem with my Thinkpad T42p as the one I had a few weeks ago with one of the LCD monitors, which is that has started blacking out the backlight at random, typically a few seconds or minutes after starting up the system. In my case, it was easy to determine that the graphics subsystem was working fine, as I normally have an external monitor connected already, which didn’t have any problems at all. That leaves the LCD panel, backlight, and inverter as likely suspects.

I found some handy resources for diagnosing and repairing notebook display problems:

Here is part of an e-book on diagnosing notebook problems, this section is Notebook LCD Display Monitor Problem

Here is an illustrated step-by-step guide to disassembling an IBM T40/T41/T42/T43 display bezel and replacing the LCD backlight inverter.

For now, the temporary workaround is to simply reduce the screen brightness to 6 bars instead of 7 bars. So far this seems to reduce the stress on the inverter and/or the LCD backlight enough that it doesn’t shut down any more.

Twhirl has a handy auto-update feature, which was giving me problems for the past few weeks. Normally, it will  notice that there is an update available and ask if you’d like to install it, but the most recent update (0.8.4) didn’t work. I was getting these error messages:

The application could not be installed because the AIR file is damaged. Try obtaining a new AIR file from the application author

An error occurred while updating the application. Try updating it again. If the problem persists, contact the application author.

After a few tries, I was guessing that it might be an AIR problem; this weekend I finally got around to some computer housekeeping, and downloaded the latest AIR runtime (1.1) from Adobe, after which the Twirl update successfully completed. Some less cryptic error messages would be helpful.

One of the LCD displays on my desk recently started flickering on occasion, and this afternoon started going completely blank. In a quick round of testing, I discovered that the graphic card works fine with other displays, and that the problematic display would actually work for a few seconds immediately after power on before the screen turned black.

A quick Google search shows that this is a fairly common problem among LCD panel displays from many manufacturers, and typically involves a problem with the power supply for the LCD backlight. One fix apparently involves replacement of several electrolytic capacitors in the power supply.

In the meantime, reducing the screen contrast and brightness has temporarily fixed the problem. It seems to be somewhat heat-related.

I recently installed the Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) upgrade on one of my multiple display systems. This particular one is the previously mentioned  HP a6110n, in a triple-headed configuration using the built-in Nvidia GeForce 6150SE/nForce 430 video and a generic GeForce 7300 card with two display outputs. The update process runs for a while, including a few reboots.

After the default upgrade process completed, the system was running ok, except the multiple displays weren’t working any more. Specifically, the primary display reverted to the built-in video, and only one of the two displays on the GeForce 7300 was selectable. I tried re-detecting the displays but nothing turned up. I also tried changing the primary display to be on the GeForce 7300 instead of the built-in GeForce 6150SE, which worked, but still didn’t make the second display on the GeForce 7300 turn up in any Control Panel dialogs.

In the end I went to the Nvidia web site and downloaded the latest version of their driver software (ForceWare Release 169.25, dated December 20, 2007). This was more recent than the latest version available in in Windows Update, and appears to have fixed the problem. After installing the updated drivers (and more reboots) all 3 displays were visible from the Control Panel. I did have to select “Extend the desktop on to this monitor” again in Display Settings to get the displays to work, but both video graphics controllers and all three displays were visible from the NVidia Control Panel immediately after updating the driver software, which was the main problem following the Vista SP1 upgrade.

At this point the multiple monitor configuration seems to be working correctly. I observed some problems with random display swapping while I was in the middle of updating drivers and changing display settings, and during the first day or so after updating the system. The primary display would spontaneously move from one monitor to another, or one monitor would become disabled and any open windows would jump to another monitor, but things have settled down now.

I have been running multiple monitors on Windows XP for quite a while, but recently had some problems getting Windows Vista to run with multiple displays. My main requirement is for lots of screen real estate and decent 2-d performance, since I don’t generally play video games and usually have dozens of document windows open at the same time.

The typical setup I’ve been running for desktop PCs has been a 3-headed configuration, with the video from the motherboard’s chipset running one display while two more video outputs come from an additional card. This has been simple to get going on WinXP, usually just requiring whatever cheap dual-output card is on sale at Frys and away we go. I took the same approach to adding multiple displays to a prebuilt Windows Vista system, and was gradually convincing myself that I could only run either the integrated graphics, or the two video displays from the additional card, since I could get one or the other to work but not both.

It turns out that running multiple video displays is actually pretty easy on Windows Vista, but only if all the displays are running the same underlying graphics driver, i.e. the video chipsets need to be from the same vendor and generally pretty recent. I had initially dropped in whatever video card was lying around, which turned out to be different than what was on the motherboard.

Lately I’ve been using the HP Pavilion a61xx and a63xx boxes as generic prebuilt systems. They come with Nvidia GeForce 6150SE nForce 430 chipset for integrated video. I have been adding a generic Nvidia GeForce 7300 card for around $70 (from Frys) with good results. I probably should have known better than to throw some random video card in there and expect it to work, but that works just fine on WinXP.

Microsoft - Multimonitor Support and Windows Vista 

I tripped over a bit of DOS arcana this afternoon while setting up a new digital picture frame. I was copying a folder containing a few hundred JPEG files into a 1GB flash card using Windows XP, and eventually got an error dialog saying something like “can’t create file”. At first I thought perhaps it had run out of room, as I didn’t bother resizing the original image files before copying, but there were still a few hundred megabytes left after copying over 250 images to the flash card.

This reminded me of a problem I encountered in the stone ages of personal computing, which is a limitation of the original DOS file system. Basically, you can’t put too many files in the root directory of a DOS file system, as there is a fixed and relatively limited storage space assigned to it when the file system is created. If you want to put hundreds of files on a DOS16 file system, you need to use subdirectories. The DOS16 file system is widely used by many flash-based devices including digital cameras, music players, and USB sticks, even though it’s rarely used by desktop systems today. The Windows XP and Vista error messages for the full DOS root directory problem are cryptic at best, so I suspect others may come across this problem while setting up their digital picture frames and similar devices after the holidays.

If you are having a problem copying files onto your flash card or USB storage device, and it’s not actually full already, try creating a subdirectory or two to hold your files instead of copying them to the root directory.

Last week I upgraded to Firefox 2.0.0.8, and discovered that Java-based web applets no longer worked. This was with Java JRE 1.6 update 3, on Windows Vista.

My initial workaround has been to use Internet Explorer to view the Java applications. Over the weekend I had a little time to investigate, and it turns out this is a known problem, and there is a workaround that will fix this until the next update to Firefox:

As mentioned in today’s Weekly Update, a serious regression involving Firefox 2.0.0.8 and JAVA (JRE 1.6 update 3)on Windows Vista ONLY has been identified. Bug 400467: Java broken on Vista after Firefox 2.0.0.8 upgrade (says Java Not Found, Or Not Working). Reviewing the bug report, the bug filer had upgraded to Fx 2.0.0.8 earlier that morning and attempted to launch/play a JAVA based game at Pogo.com and was told that they could access the site with IE7. There is a possible work-around for this:

1. Right click Firefox icon and choose “Run as administrator”
2. Accept UAC prompt
3. Enter any site which use a Java applet, Java should load normally
4. Close Firefox
5. Run Firefox again, but in normal mode (without administrator privileges)

This worked for me. This is a surprisingly major bug to get through the release process, though.

Over the past few weeks, I have noticed an increasing volume of spam comments from various “sandra-” user names, which promptly get added to the comment blacklist.

Recently added: sandra-qn, sandra-oa, sandra-sc, sandra-ss, sandra-eb, sandra-ri, sandra-md, sandra-jy, sandra-ro, sandra-ew, sandra-pv, sandra-hn, sandra-mm, sandra-lb

This sort of spam really calls for a regular expression filter, if I ever get around to doing some blog maintenance.

Another note from getting Windows 2000 running on an old computer. I had an ancient Diamond Stealth II S220 PCI card in the closet, and this particular motherboard doesn’t have integrated video. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to locate Windows 2000 drivers for this particular video card.

However, it turns out that there are reference implementation drivers for the Rendition Verite V2100/V2200 graphics chip that work on Windows 2000.

Wikipedia article on Rendition, the Verite graphics processor, and its use in Diamond Stealth S220.

Here is where I found a useable Windows 2000 driver for the Diamond Stealth S220 / Rendition Verite.

Warning - this driver is a little unstable. The original poster reports:

DISCLAIMER: I am unsure of the quality of this driver, my computer can sometimes be unstable and will randomly freeze or hang: suddenly the mouse will not move anymore and the keyboard doesn’t respond. Sometimes a pattern comes up on the screen and sometimes everything looks fine but nothing works. The machine still replies to a ping when this happens, but won’t accept any network connections. So something is wrong, it could be this driver or it could be something else dodgy in my computer. Try it and see, I would be really interested to know how everybody else goes with this.

There may be other drivers available from the registration- subscription- and fee-based driver sites. Interestingly, at least one site gives you the option of viewing a lot of ads instead of registering for access to their driver library. I tried this, but it turned out that the last page redirect after all the ads goes to a non-existent page.

This weekend, I’ve been doing a clean install of Windows 2000 on an old computer, starting with original Windows 2000, then the SP4 rollup, then running Windows Update to load all the miscellaneous patches.

Unfortunately, on a clean install of Win2K followed by SP4 (which tightened the security model), Windows Update won’t work, as it want to install and use the updated BITS service. The symptoms are that it will try to install, then report that the installation failed.

After a lengthy search online, here are the two steps that appear to fix it (worked for me):

1. Make sure that “Microsoft Client for Networks” is one of the installed services for the network adapter. I started out with just TCP/IP. I’m not completely convinced that this is needed, but it was mentioned in a few places.

2. In the User Administration control panel, add Administrator (or the account you’re using to update from) to the Backup Operators group.

After making these two changes, Windows Update will begin to work as expected, instead of failing every time.