The noise from my laptop was due to dust accumulating in the laptop fan, and light blow from a vacuum cleaner did the trick (fingers XXXXX). So far, it has been operating as it had done before, without any problems, hope it stays that way.

Any of you having a Dell laptop, please make sure you check your battery, you might be in trouble if you have Sony bettery in your Dell laptop. Further info here.

For sometime now, my Compaq laptop fan has been emitting a high pitched noise every now and then.  This happens when I try to view webpages with high quality graphic content, for example, http://www.cnn.com or any photographic website.  I thought it could be a problem with defragmenting the HDD and I have done that, eventhough the defrag analyzer said that there was no need to defrag my HDD and still the problem crops up.  I am thinking of dumping my entire song and software collection onto some DVDs and formatting my HDD.

Is this the best way to go ?  Google and HP.com.au don’t provide any suitable answers, or they were not visible to me (as a disclaimer).

If you haven’t heard of it, make sure you visit http://pack.google.com, for downloading a list of software provided by Google from Norton Antivirus 2005 SE, Firefox with Google Toolbar, Google Earth etc for free. The downloads do take some time here in Australia, don’t know the speed in USA. It is a worthwhile option from Google to provide much needed software and from third party sources like Symantec and Firefox too.

One thing about the free Adobe Reader 7.0, the claim is that it opens pdf files 50% faster than the previous version, I have tested it, and it does open files faster.  I did not time it to count the 50% speedup, but it maybe true empirically.

For the last three days, I was really surprised to find that even though my broadband connection in the taskbar is showing data flowing fully in both directions, the pages were taking too long to load, sometimes even slower than dial up speeds.  I was pondering over what could be the reason behind this abnormality, when all of a sudden today, I had a thought to change the login password for my broadband service.  Wonder of wonders, the speed increased dramatically, and the pages have started to appear as fast as they did previously.  So, changing the password helps !!

I change the passwords for my banking accounts regularly but this one never occured to me that I should change it.  So, users of broadband, learn from me, change the password often.

z500_m

Originally uploaded by Memories Galore.

I have ditched my old mobile phone, a NEC e616 for a swankier and lighter Samsung Z500. My mobile services provider is still 3, part of the Hutchison group. The phone is capable of 3G and weighs only 94g with 50 MB of internal memory. The camera is much more than the previous e616. This one has a 1 MP digital camera and has some good photo shooting modes. So far, totally, satisfied with the new mobile phone for only $13 a month for 24 months.