Friday, 30 December 2011
Why computer freezes
The answer to this question depends on many factors. The computer freezing cause can be software relate or hardware related.
Software related freezes can be caused by a virus, a incompatible drivers, or even operating system design errors but this is very rare.
Other part is a hardware caused freezes. This can be from memory faults, hard disk faults to overheating the CPU etc.
To say what is wrong with the PC straight away is almost impossible. To find the freezing cause best way is to use fault isolation. This is universal method and used by many engineers in PC and Mac worlds.
The main principle is to perform a test or isolate a part of hardware and perform a test. Then if the fault still ezsist we perform second test or isolating the hardware. As test example would be memory so called RAM test. As example we can take the DVD drive from the laptop and then see how it works. We had once a freezing laptop which was with a faulty DVD drive. After the replacement everything worked perfectly.
If the computer freezes completely and even the cursor does not move the best way to start is to test the memory. We seen some of cases when such a total system freeze was caused by faulty laptop memory. Faulty memory or RAM is very rare but it happens from time to time and we cant overlook it.
To test the memory the best software available out there is Memtest. It is a bootable CD. It needs simply to be downloaded to the working system then burned to the CD and then booted on the freezing system.
If this test will show some message in red then congratulations you just found the cause of computer freeze.
If the computer is slow and freezes sometimes but the cursor still can be moved then very high probability that the hard drive is faulty. In other words the information from the hard drive is read is different than it was written.
Especially this is frequent for hard drives that are over three years old. There is a special software to test the hard drive HDTune. Better is to take the hard drive out connect it to the another computer and test it.
If the bad sector will show up as shown in the image below the freezing causing fault has been found.
IMAGE
If the RAM and the hard drive are ok then this probably is caused by operating system. Also if this is a laptop needs to be checked for overheating. Usually overheating is caused by the dust that clogs the heat sink.
If the freezing still happens after the re-installation then probably the CPU or the motherboard are faulty.
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Sunday, 18 December 2011
Recovering data from broken usb dongle.doc
The pen drive is the standard usb interface with added to it
a small memory chip. All usb pen drives are made by the same principle that the
communication is based on usb signals.
When we brake the usb dongle usually the crack occurs when
the metal plug is connected to the PCB inside the device. The inside structure
of this device is similar and varies just the how manufacturer implements the
wiering or in other words the tracks on the PCB.
In every drive we will find the two tracks that are in the
middle of the plug. They are data + and data – tracks. The other two are power
as +5 V and the ground.
To repair the broken we just need to connct again the broken
tracks together and copy the data as soon as possible. The drive after we do
this would not be usable just because the wires can broke again best is just to
bin it.
Here is the image that show the internal structure of the
pen drive.
We need to connect together wery small four wires that are
on the so called PCB (printed cirquit board). Ia am doing it with very small
soldering iron. And this is not so easy to do so if you do it first better is
to practice this on something else.
You will need also a flux and tip dip to clean the soldering
iron tip. Also the solder is necessary.
To better understand what to connect here is more images
showing the connections.
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