Remove the battery and wait one minute



  • I'll try to make this short but if its too long just skip down to the "Today I get a call from a tech..." paragraph for the WTF.



    My mom has a Sony VAIO on which the bluetooth stopped working last week. After troubleshooting it with her it was discovered that the computer no longer discovers USB devices any longer either. In fact, Windows refuses to believe there are even any usb ports on the computer. Furthermore, even with no USB devices attached Windows believes every few seconds that a device is being connected (it plays that sound you get when a device is connected and then pops up a message that there's something wrong with the USB device attached).

    After going through the basic troubleshooting steps I became quite confident that the issue is actually hardware related, so I gave Sony a call and of course was run through the usual steps that I had already performed but just did them again to humor the tech (reinstall drivers, system restore, etc etc). It got to the point where they wanted me to format the hard drive and put a clean install of the os on (Windows 7) because "this is the only way we can determine if it is a hardware or software issue". I told them there was no way I was doing that and they eventually gave in and said I would be contacted within the next few days to set up an appointment for a service technician to come out.



    Today I get a call from a tech while I'm in class, so she leaves me a voicemail. She states that sony has denied my technician request because this is most definitely a software issue and the way to resolve it as follows: remove the ac adaptor and battery from the computer. wait one minute. replace battery and ac adaptor. power on pc. issue will be resolved.



    Now I will admit that I'm not majoring in computer science or anything related (Finance actually). I have however spent three summers and a winter vacation taking calls on a corporate help desk, so I know my way around troubleshooting, especially when it comes to going through the hoops to diagnose whether an issue is hardware or software related. That being said, for the life of me I cannot fathom how removing all power sources from a computer is any different than simply shutting the computer down, especially considering Sony's belief that this is a software issue. Additionally, what could possibly come from waiting one minute after the power sources are disconnected?? just to make sure the computer is really really really 100% definitely shut down? Am I missing something here, or is this "fix" the colossal WTF that I think it is?



    I was so taken aback by the voicemail that I recorded it, but I'm a little wary of posting it because I'm in Pennsylvania and I know they have some screwy laws when it comes to recording stuff on the phone.



    Maybe I'm just missing something with this, but if not either 1. Sony customer support is retarded or 2. Sony truly believes its customers are retarded.



  •  It's already recorded, in the voicemail system, and they know it (because they left the voicemail).  Wiretap laws don't apply in this case. (IANAL, YMMV, etc. I wouldn't have a problem sharing a voicemail someone left at my number.)

     Edit: TRWTF is, of course, Community Server: "Last post Mon, Mar 29 2010 3:20 PM by Heron. 1 replies."

    Never noticed that before.



  • @bullrider718 said:

    That being said, for the life of me I cannot fathom how removing all power sources from a computer is any different than simply shutting the computer down, especially considering Sony's belief that this is a software issue.

    These days shutting down is almost a software thing. Some components are powered all the time. (so you can get Wake-on-lan and other funky features)

    @bullrider718 said:

    Additionally, what could possibly come from waiting one minute after the power sources are disconnected??

    Most capacitors have time to discharge.

    @bullrider718 said:

    Am I missing something here, or is this "fix" the colossal WTF that I think it is?

    Proably a WTF. But if they sound very certain of it - give it a try. I had a laptop which shut down every time I connected the USB plug too quickly and stayed completely dark, until I disconnected and reconnected the battery. (100% repeatable) Actually, I just remembered it was also a Sony VAIO - maybe it's really a common problem?



  • As an ex professional electronic engineer I can see where they're coming from on this one. Taking the battery out will ensure that there is no chance of any power going into the machine at all. Any dynamic memory will then be completely cleared. But I would suspect that there is definitely a h/w problem. Waiting one minute will ensure that any stray charge on any capacitances will have completely drained away. As there is a logarithmic/exponential decay function on this, it can never drain completely, but a minute is probably about long enough.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @bullrider718 said:

    remove the ac adaptor and battery from the computer. wait one minute. replace battery and ac adaptor. power on pc.
    Possibly not quite as brain-dead as it may at first appear, and certainly worth a try - it doesn't take long. My Dell Vostro laptop has an occasional problem whereby, under certain circumstances, it appears that a key is being pressed every second, but no input is visible in (say) text boxes. Editing a Google Docs spreadsheet for example is impossible when the laptop is doing this. Soft reboots and 'hard reboots' using the power button don't fix it.



    The 'fix' I found on't'interwebs is do exactly what they ask - power down, remove AC and battery for a short time, and power back up. It stops misbehaving until the next time it starts up (which is infrequent.)



  • @bullrider718 said:

    Maybe I'm just missing something with this, but if not either 1. Sony customer support is retarded or 2. Sony truly believes its customers are retarded.

    I had the EXACT same issue on a Dell laptop with Vista...someone installed a new printer via USB and subsequently that stupid USB warning came up every minute or so.  After checking on the interwebs I found the same "resolution" which I also scoffed at.  After trying everything else I powered off, removed the battery and let it sit.  I even felt retarded doing it, like pumping the gas on my fuel-injected car to start it in the morning.  I'll be damned if it didn't work immediately.  Never had a problem since.

     MJM



  • @mmarinov said:

    @bullrider718 said:

    Maybe I'm just missing something with this, but if not either 1. Sony customer support is retarded or 2. Sony truly believes its customers are retarded.

    I had the EXACT same issue on a Dell laptop with Vista...someone installed a new printer via USB and subsequently that stupid USB warning came up every minute or so.  After checking on the interwebs I found the same "resolution" which I also scoffed at.  After trying everything else I powered off, removed the battery and let it sit.  I even felt retarded doing it, like pumping the gas on my fuel-injected car to start it in the morning.  I'll be damned if it didn't work immediately.  Never had a problem since.

     MJM

    Oh man, way to ruin my day...I was quite enjoying my rage at sony. My mom's going to give it a try when she's home (I'm at school and have already driven home once for this issue--2 hours but still--everythings being done from logmein at this point).

    Although I didn't expect any less than such a response on here.



    Edit: +1 for the analogy by the way, it captured my feelings exactly.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @bullrider718 said:

    Oh man, way to ruin my day...I was quite enjoying my rage at sony. My mom's going to give it a try when she's home
    Let us know how she gets on...



  • It also works on cars.  We had a case where a suspected faulty sensor (no prior symptoms of anythig wrong) had put the car into "limp home" mode, meaning there was knocking, a lot of smoke, limited power etc.  After disconnecting the battery and waiting 5 mins it was fine.  I suspect that reset the MMU and/or discharged capacitance in a sensor or something.



  • @bullrider718 said:

    either 1. Sony customer support is retarded or 2. Sony truly believes its customers are retarded.
     

    No "all of the above" option?



  • I've had good and bad moments with Sony support - I had my PSN account suspended, and it took going through three people to get me up and running again (make sure you enter your password correctly,....). The first two insisted I was entering the password wrong, even though the specific error said my account had been suspended. On the other end of the spectrum, Sony replaced my 3 year old 42" LCD rear projection that had developed LCD chip damage (purple line) with a 46" LCD flat panel for $300, and I got to keep the RPTV (which I then sold for $180). And Sony waived a $300 non-warranty repair bill on my girlfriends' VAIO because they took 5 weeks to get an AC adapter in.

    As for the unplugging/removing of battery, to re-iterate what others have said, yeah, there is some merit with removing all power sources from a computer. Back to my girlfriends VIAO, once it would not come out of hibernation even after the old hold-down-the-power-button-for-5-seconds trick. Removing the battery, unplugging, and waiting a minute got her back up and running.



  • @bullrider718 said:

    the way to resolve it as follows: remove the ac adaptor and battery from the computer. wait one minute. replace battery and ac adaptor. power on pc. issue will be resolved.
     

     My first thought was "You mean you didn't do this bit of basic troubleshooting long before calling tech support?" Yes, pulling the battery from a notebook is, well, probably the third step in troubleshooting anything that is beginning to sound hardwareish: You probably had corrupt firmware loaded into the usb controller, and pulling power will force a reload.

     Maybe TRWTF is firmware in a usb controller. Or firmware in sdram!



  • @robbak said:

    @bullrider718 said:

    the way to resolve it as follows: remove the ac adaptor and battery from the computer. wait one minute. replace battery and ac adaptor. power on pc. issue will be resolved.

     

     My first thought was "You mean you didn't do this bit of basic troubleshooting long before calling tech support?" Yes, pulling the battery from a notebook is, well, probably the third step in troubleshooting anything that is beginning to sound hardwareish: You probably had corrupt firmware loaded into the usb controller, and pulling power will force a reload.

     Maybe TRWTF is firmware in a usb controller. Or firmware in sdram!

    Well, this must have been it. She took the battery out for a minute and after powering up again everything was functioning.



    So I will say my excuse is that my help desk experience was only with desktops :) Sony's excuse for not suggesting this before they told me I needed to format the harddrive....



    thanks everyone! I guess I'm the real WTF in the end... live and learn



  • @bullrider718 said:

    @robbak said:

    @bullrider718 said:

    the way to resolve it as follows: remove the ac adaptor and battery from the computer. wait one minute. replace battery and ac adaptor. power on pc. issue will be resolved.
     

     My first thought was "You mean you didn't do this bit of basic troubleshooting long before calling tech support?" Yes, pulling the battery from a notebook is, well, probably the third step in troubleshooting anything that is beginning to sound hardwareish: You probably had corrupt firmware loaded into the usb controller, and pulling power will force a reload.

     Maybe TRWTF is firmware in a usb controller. Or firmware in sdram!

    Well, this must have been it. She took the battery out for a minute and after powering up again everything was functioning.



    So I will say my excuse is that my help desk experience was only with desktops :) Sony's excuse for not suggesting this before they told me I needed to format the harddrive....



    thanks everyone! I guess I'm the real WTF in the end... live and learn

     

     

    that is all someone can do.



  • @bullrider718 said:

    Well, this must have been it. She took the battery out for a minute and after powering up again everything was functioning.
     

    We can now look forward to Sony trying this on every problem from now on.  Way to confirm the voodoo technique.



  • yeah this was a common troubleshooting technique when I worked on a helpdesk about 6 years ago. Worked 90% of the time



  • deleting a d/p



  • ...would really suck if this happened to a MacBook...
    no user-removable battery!

    (Disclaimer: I like most Apple hardware. I'm typing this on a Mac Pro. I just hate the integrated-battery bullshit on iPods and newer MacBooks!)



  •  The Real WTF here is that the machine is a Vaio. Sony is *notorious* for this crap. Point and case: a now dead vaio machine (came with XP preinstalled, had the big 1024x768 TFT LCD, it was the bomb) was having problems with the hard disk. I'd randomly get the message "Could not access drive C: Device not ready". After confirming it was *not* the OS (ddrescue to the rescue) Sony claimed that my problem "was beyond their control". The device was *under warranty*. I explain to them that it was a problem with the hard disk. They said a clean installation would fix it. I since have not trusted sony for shit (well, okay they make a reasonable gaming platform once you crack it heavily, but computers, they suck at)


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @da Doctah said:

    Way to confirm the voodoo technique.
    There have been some perfectly plausible explanations as to why this works, along with some perfectly valid other first hand experiences where this method works. Where, exactly, is the voodoo?



  • @bullrider718 said:

    What could possibly come from waiting one minute after the power sources are disconnected?? just to make sure the computer is really really really 100% definitely shut down? Am I missing something here, or is this "fix" the colossal WTF that I think it is?
    Maybe I'm just missing something with this, but if not either 1. Sony customer support is retarded or 2. Sony truly believes its customers are retarded.


    It's not that weird actually.

    A while back my mom bought a brand new computer.
    She was trying some of the buttons on the keyboard (sleep button, specifically) and somehow got her computer in limbo
    When starting up it wanted to sleep, but it didn't go to sleep cause it was starting up.
    The fix was to unplug the power cord, power on the machine and let the internal backup battery drain (a few secs and the computer was off)
    It completely cleared the memory and reset the state of the computer.
    After reconnecting the power cord the computer started like normal.

    Most of the times computers keep something in memory. Withholding it from *any* form of power will clear it
    By Any, that includes capacitors which take time to lose their charge.



  •  Computers work on wall outlets. That's AC, which in turn goes smoothly from one polarity to the other, crossing 0 V along the way.... 

     So there are these periods of 0V on the line voltage. During these periods,  the computer runs off the charge stored in capacitors. Now a modern laptop can use up to 100W, and for calculating purposes you can take the "period of 0V that needs to be bridged" as 10ms. 

     

    Now if  a laptop is off, the laptop may only use 0.1W. So that same capacitor that holds enough for 100W for 0.01s can now power  0.1W for 10 seconds!With a sizeable margin, powering things off for 1 minute should be enough... 

     

    Now, in general, these capacitors are located in the poweradapter, so disconnecting that will rid you of leftover charge on those capacitors. But some smaller  capacitors are also located inside the laptop....

     

    To view this in action you need a laptop with a led on the power adapter. Turn off the laptop, disconnect the laptop, then pull the plug of the power adapter, and record how long it takes before it starts dimming.... 



  • @rew said:

    you need a laptop with a led on the power adapter. Turn off the laptop, disconnect the laptop, then pull the plug of the power adapter, and record how long it takes before it starts dimming.... 

     I have a 10" eeepc that I run kismet on when my girlfriend decides that she's driving somewhere (believe me, it's less horrifying to look at that miniature screen than to look out the windows while she's driving). That little power adapter takes 10-15 seconds for the power LED to turn off when it is unplugged. The first time I unplugged it, I sat there with a WTF look on my face. It takes a lot longer on the eeePC than my work laptop.



  • This is a perfectly valid request from Sony. Completely removing the power allows all the capacitors on the motherboard to discharge and allow onboard devices to re-initialise when power is restored.

    I had an Asus motherboard that under Vista and Windows 7 if the OS performed a hardware scan to find devices then that would cause both the onboard NICs to immediately fail. Both lights on both NICs would lock permanently on and the devices would vanish from the OS. No amount of rebooting would fix it, the only way to get the NICs working was to withdraw all power for ~30s and wait for the NIC lights to go off, then power it back up and everything was working fine again.

    Zadkiel



  •  This is evidence of a completely bogus design. On every "off" to "on" transition of a device, all electronics engineers know that you need to assert the "reset" pin of all (complex) chips in the device.  If you don't you might for example encounter a NIC that comes up in a state that makes it disapppear for the OS... 



  • You have to remember, embedded systems like notebooks don't have filesystems, so they have to store all their firmware settings in battery-backed magnetic core memory.  Removing the battery allowed the magnets to reorient themselves so they were facing north; which when read by the boot process indicated the value "File Not Found" and prompted the system to restore the last known working configuration.

     



  • @Rootbeer said:

    You have to remember, embedded systems like notebooks don't have filesystems, so they have to store all their firmware settings in battery-backed magnetic core memory.  Removing the battery allowed the magnets to reorient themselves so they were facing north; which when read by the boot process indicated the value "File Not Found" and prompted the system to restore the last known working configuration.

    +1 helpful



  • @Indrora said:

    (well, okay they make a reasonable gaming platform once you crack it heavily, but computers, they suck at)
     

    They do?

    I thought they made a Blu-Ray player with some game features heavily "borrowed" from their competitors which, despite the legendary amount of hype before release, struggles to keep-up to a console designed with 1-year-older technology by a software company.

    I thought they lost almost all of the exclusive publishers from their last console, because the current one is so crap, so that now games like Grand Theft Auto, Final Fantasy, and Resident Evil are seen more on that software company's console than the console that used to maintain an iron grip on them.

    I was somehow under the impression that they completely destroyed their launch flagship dragon-flying title by making last-minute changes to show off their motion controls ("borrowed" from a competitor, of course) and thus making it nearly unplayable. By "last minute", of course, I mean "delaying the title until it was no longer a launch title."

    I thought that after two years of their VR Second Life-esque dashboard application being nothing but vaporware, it turned out so disappointing that nobody actually uses it.

    I wonder why I had the impression that Sony completely spit on and stomped over indie developers by restricting them to a retarded Linux prison with no access to the GPU, then removing the Linux support altogether. (Of course a more cynical person would say they didn't care about indie devs from day one, and the Linux support was only a failed ploy to dodge import duties.)

    Silly me. 

    (BTW, I'm not a fan of Sony.)



  • @blakeyrat said:

    They do?
    *sigh*

    I'm not a PS fanboy or anything, but I'm going to set the record straight here.

    The PS3's lack of strength in the marketplace has more to do with its price than anything.  They failed backwards compatibility, but that's really secondary to the fact that it cost $600 at release.  Evidence:  Once they said "fuck backwards compat" and lowered the price (to half its original price), they picked up remarkably and are competing with the 360.

    GTA hasn't been a PS Exclusive EVER except for the few months between the PS2 and the XBOX release of GTAIII.  Final Fantasy moving to the 360 is shocking in a lot of ways, though.  I don't like RE so I can't comment on it.

    The PS3 is still technologically the best console on the market, but that's far from the only thing that makes a great console.  

    They didn't borrow motion control.  They stole it and fucked it up.  I will not argue that the motion control in the PS3 is crap. PS Move, on the other hand, looks to best Wii at being Wii.

    PSHome is crap.  Who wants to spend time in a virtual world interacting with other losers when I can, you know, play games? 

    The indie thing, idk about, but I'll believe you.  AFAIK the 360 is the only console that really embraces indie.  

    Also, you forgot about the ApocalyPS3.  I know I like to use my console on all days, not just days that aren't two years minus one day after a leap day.



  • @belgariontheking said:

    The PS3's lack of strength in the marketplace has more to do with its price than anything.  They failed backwards compatibility, but that's really secondary to the fact that it cost $600 at release.  Evidence:  Once they said "fuck backwards compat" and lowered the price (to half its original price), they picked up remarkably and are competing with the 360.
     

    This is true.

    However, part of the problem here is that the high price was due to a Blu-ray drive that very few gamers actually wanted. I fully understanding Sony wanting to use a higher-capacity disk format for games, but at the time they were releasing this console that simply was not practical-- the cost of that disk format was far too high to be a standard feature in a game console.

    Of course, now that the economy has kind of tanked and the next console generation is going to take awhile to show up, maybe Sony's decision will be vindicated. Even now, though, I don't think game developers are clamoring for more storage. (Except Final Fantasy, since those games are nothing but 50 hours of video anyway.)

    Also I think both the Xbox 360 and PS3 have proved that backwards compatibility was mostly hype. Sony only started it up in the PS2 because they were using that PS1 chip *anyway*, so they could add the capability basically "for free". Both the Xbox 360 and PS3 are different-enough from the previous generation that backwards compatibility isn't worth the time it takes to do it.

    But at least the Xbox compatibility layer hasn't been removed for new hardware revisions! Sony has a strange habit of releasing new products with fewer features than the old one-- the PSP Go, the PS3 firmware update that removes Linux support, etc.

    @belgariontheking said:

    GTA hasn't been a PS Exclusive EVER except for the few months between the PS2 and the XBOX release of GTAIII.

    Fair enough.

    @belgariontheking said:

    Final Fantasy moving to the 360 is shocking in a lot of ways, though.

    So was Team Ninja for the original Xbox. Microsoft getting any attention from hard-core Japanese developers is shocking, and really says something about Sony.

    @belgariontheking said:

    The PS3 is still technologically the best console on the market, but that's far from the only thing that makes a great console.

    Is it?

    Other than the Blu-ray drive, the PS3 hardware is neck-and-neck with the Xbox 360 hardware-- and the Xbox 360 came out a full year earlier. It doesn't help that the PS3 is (relatively) hard to program for.

    @belgariontheking said:

    They didn't borrow motion control.  They stole it and fucked it up.  I will not argue that the motion control in the PS3 is crap.

    What really, really bothers me about that situation is how they screwed over the Lair developers, by forcing them to include the motion control feature after the entire game was 99% done. The result? It destroyed their game, and simultaneously made it late. And I was so excited for it.

    If I was a designer for Lair, I'd be *pissed*.

    @belgariontheking said:

    PS Move, on the other hand, looks to best Wii at being Wii.

    Eh, I'm not into motion control games. Natal looks good, too, but I'm surprised Microsoft is bolting it on to the existing Xbox 360 ecosystem instead of releasing a new console for it... especially since Natal tracking takes ~ 30% of CPU time away from the game.

    Has an aftermarket game console add-in *ever* been successful in the history of *ever*? Microsoft's taking a huge risk with it.

    I would have loved to be in the board room at Sony when Natal was demoed, though. "Shit! What do we got?" "We got a magic wand." "Shit!!"

    @belgariontheking said:

    Also, you forgot about the ApocalyPS3.  I know I like to use my console on all days, not just days that aren't two years minus one day after a leap day.

    Heh. Gave it a pass, since Microsoft made the exact same mistake on their Zune product line.



  • @blakey: I agree with everything, or at least don't feel like reading it again so that my goldfish brain can remember what I disagreed with.@blakeyrat said:

    Has an aftermarket game console add-in *ever* been successful in the history of *ever*?
    The one that was really successful was that memory expansion for N64.  Everybody I know had that because it enhanced a lot of games. (read: Perfect Dark and Donkey Kong).

    However, obviously it is a risk to try to get people to buy the add-ons.  Packaging it with a popular or anticipated game will either kill that game or make the peripheral succeed. 

    However, I don't agree with making a new console for the new peripherals.  I know that in past generations, this is around the time there would be a new round of consoles, but that would be an even bigger risk than just a new peripheral IMO.



  • " Computers work on wall outlets. That's AC, which in turn goes smoothly from one polarity to the other, crossing 0 V along the way....

    So there are these periods of 0V on the line voltage. During these periods, the computer runs off the charge stored in capacitors. "


    AAARGH! Go away and learn how power supplies work. The above is the technological equivalent of "The moon is made of green cheese because if it were made out of yellow cheese Santa Claus would eat it all up on his way back the North Pole."



  • @Matt Westwood said:

    The above is the technological equivalent of "The moon is made of green cheese because if it were made out of yellow cheese Santa Claus would eat it all up on his way back the North Pole."

    Wait, so you're saying the moon is made of yellow cheese?  My mind is blown...



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Has an aftermarket game console add-in *ever* been successful in the history of *ever*?
    Sony might argue that the whole SNES-CD thing was a rousing success.

    @blakeyrat said:

    Microsoft's taking a huge risk with it.
    I think they're looking at it like the Guitar Hero/Rock Band peripherals and assuming they'll rake in the money.  Of course, if Tony Hawk: Ride and DJ Hero have taught us anything, it's that the killer app sells the peripheral, not the other way around.



  • @Matt Westwood said:

    " Computers work on wall outlets. That's AC, which in turn goes smoothly from one polarity to the other, crossing 0 V along the way....

    So there are these periods of 0V on the line voltage. During these periods, the computer runs off the charge stored in capacitors. "


    AAARGH! Go away and learn how power supplies work.

    I know, right?  And it's not like it's hard to understand.  Power supplies work by converting electricity into tiny horses which turn tiny wheels to drive tiny gears.  Alternating current is useful because sometimes the tiny horses will turn the tiny wheels in the alternate direction, which allows the device to operate the other way.  This forum's editor sometimes deletes two characters when you hit backspace once because the alternate tiny horses are improperly calibrated.  They need a tiny horse whisperer to correct this.



  • @Matt Westwood said:

    " Computers work on wall outlets. That's AC, which in turn goes smoothly from one polarity to the other, crossing 0 V along the way....

    So there are these periods of 0V on the line voltage. During these periods, the computer runs off the charge stored in capacitors. "


    AAARGH! Go away and learn how power supplies work. The above is the technological equivalent of "The moon is made of green cheese because if it were made out of yellow cheese Santa Claus would eat it all up on his way back the North Pole."

     

     To learn how power supplies work, read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectifier#Rectifier_output_smoothing

     A capacitor most certainly is used to smooth out the voltage while the AC dips to 0V. 

     As for the rest of your statement.... WTF?!?!?

     



  • @Matt Westwood said:

    " Computers work on wall outlets. That's AC, which in turn goes smoothly from one polarity to the other, crossing 0 V along the way.... So there are these periods of 0V on the line voltage. During these periods, the computer runs off the charge stored in capacitors. "
    AAARGH! Go away and learn how power supplies work. The above is the technological equivalent of "The moon is made of green cheese because if it were made out of yellow cheese Santa Claus would eat it all up on his way back the North Pole."

    Come on. Santa wants to cut some cheese, too.


  • Everything I've read here matches Sony's design process:

    1. Engineers design some really nice, almost over-engineered hardware.
    2. Kernel developers write an API that is powerful, but horribly difficult to use.
    3. Software developers hack together the bare minimum needed to claim the advertised functionality. ("Can play MP3 files" = "Portable music player", despite lack of playlist support, etc.)
    4. Manufacturers build the hardware poorly. The design flaws are eventually fixed, so the 4th or 5th (or sometimes 8th or 9th) hardware revision finally works quite well.
    5. Marketing and DRM guys crap on the whole thing. (Video player? Limit it to less-than-fullscreen resolution just in case anyone wanted to try to copy UMD movies. Linux? Remove it. etc.)



      The result is a pretty nice gadget, that if you wait long enough, may actually work pretty well and last a while, and with enough software hacking, may even do something useful.



      (For those shouting "fanboy": Nintendo and Microsoft are no angels either, but that's another post.)


  • I deal with a lot of HP laptops that suffer from an issue almost like that. But HP Calls it Static buildup.



  • TRWTF is that I get trolled for abusing an ISP tech who was suggesting something absurd, but when someone posts a non-WTF everyone lets them off with no extra special 'you made a mistake' trollism!

    Of course I'm fully prepared for the trolling and flaming that may result from this post

    (Charleh.config) 

    <AntiTrollWare enable="true" />

    <Firewall enable="true" />



  • @Charleh said:

    TRWTF is that I get trolled for abusing an ISP tech who was suggesting something absurd, but when someone posts a non-WTF everyone lets them off with no extra special 'you made a mistake' trollism!

    Of course I'm fully prepared for the trolling and flaming that may result from this post

    (Charleh.config) 

    <AntiTrollWare enable="true" />

    <Firewall enable="true" />

     

     

    You are the troll... no you are a quine troll.  



  • I'd call myself more recursive than quine - though I realise now that I've been turned by the other trolls into one of their kind...



  •  My girlfriend has an HP laptop that after shutting it down sometimes, cannot be restarted without removing the battery for a couple of seconds.  It seems strange, but makes complete sense when you stop believing computers are hardwired to respond the same way to the same inputs, and start believing computers are tempermental bastards.



  • @wr3cktangle said:

    It seems strange, but makes complete sense when you stop believing computers are hardwired to respond the same way to the same inputs, and start believing computers are tempermental bastards.
    Indeed, while my analytical debugging skills are second to none, my true strength in IT is my keen insight into computer psychology.



  • HP Laptops are great with stuff like that. here is a little gem of a WTF that I have with my laptop.  By Abnormal amount of time they mean infinity minutes. So in reality what I have to do if my laptop goes to sleep is to use a USB mouse until I have time to shutdown, remove the battery and start up again.


    The notebook PC touchpad may take an abnormal amount of time to begin functioning after the notebook PC boots or resumes from Hibernation/Standby mode.

    SCOPE
    The specific notebook PCs affected by this issue are listed in the Hardware Platforms Affected section at the bottom of this advisory.

    RESOLUTION
    To resolve this issue, please perform the following:

    Prevent fingers from touching the notebook PC touchpad for a few seconds after booting the notebook or after the notebook resumes from Hibernation/Standby mode.

    [Fixed your horribly-formatted text -bs]


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