Router Replacement with old defective router?

DEFECTIVE ROUTERS? ... brought back to life?

I think I have possibly blogged about this before, or twittered it or something, but it has happened again, and I'm confused!

About every month or so I have to replace my router. It just all of a sudden quits allowing a wireless connection but still allows a hard wired connection, or it will just start locking up every few minutes and I will have to power cycle the router to get internet access again. What I don't understand is that it does this quite often, and nothing I do seems to fix it. I have upgraded the firmware, positioned the equipment away from any EMI waves. I can go in and reset to default, reconfigure it with static ips or with dhcp either one, and it will still give me problems. I have tried to use the routers plugged in to a UPS and without the UPS..... this has been going on with different routers for about a year (if not more!). I have a crate of the old routers in the shed, and what is weird is when the router dies... I can go get another router (that was once dead) and plug it back up ... reconfigure it.. and it will work fine for a month or so until it does the same thing! Is it a conspiracy against me? Is it my ISP doing it because I have too many connections on my dsl line? Am I overloading my routers?.. different routers? Any suggestions?

Oh By the Way.. Window Update

Sorry... I should have posted this before the motherboard blog.

I finally got my window put in on Friday. Exactly 15 days of patiently waiting. I have to say that it was done correctly...perfectly level, the colors and trim matched exactly with the other windows, and most importantly it did not leak. We had 2 days of rain this week on Wed and Thursday, and it did not leak a drop. So even though it took longer than expected, and I was getting aggravated because of the disorder... it was done great and I have no other complaints. It sure is nice to see out to the main road now!

Diagnosis of a Bad Motherboard!

I hate telling someone that their motherboard is the problem, but sometimes it happens. For me personally it is hard to accept. I have spent many hours on a $20 diagnostic trying everything possible to bring a system back to life.... only to finally give in and tell the customer they need a new motherboard and most likely a new processor and RAM to fit that motherboard. From my experience, motherboard damage can be as small as the onboard video needing to be replaced with a video card to as major as bulged capacitors leaking residue on to the motherboard and it not powering on at all.

To determine a bad motherboard I follow a basic procedure of taking a part out at a time and powering on the system after each part is removed.

Test and Replace the Power Supply if necessary
Then Remove any PCI cards from their slots one at a time.
Remove video card / Use onboard VGA (or use another known good vga card)
Then disconnect the cd rom and dvd drives one at a time.
Then disconnect the hard drive(s) one at a time.
Remove a stick of RAM (Memory) one at a time.
Remove all RAM from the system (do you hear a beep code?)
Reseat the processor, replace with a known good working one if necessary.

If you are down to just the motherboard, a known good processor, a known good power supply and a known good video source and you still cannot get the computer to POST (or even power on at all) than you have a bad motherboard.

Patiently waiting, and loosing customers

I have been waiting since the beginning of last week.. almost 10 days now for a window to be put in in my shop facing the road. My shop has been in disarray for this whole time now. They never called me last week to cancel.. they just didn't show up. I finally moved stuff back around on Monday so that I could work in there again.... then I called them Monday and Tuesday to ask when it was going to be put in.. on Wednesday he called me and said that he was on his way around 1pm. I waiting till 3:30 when he called and postponed again for tommorow! This is really ticking me off. I've had to move my whole front office around to compensate for them, and then yesterday I had to shut down the shop and tarp everything up... move what was needed to be moved.. ya know?! I mean, I'm loosing business while I'm being pushed around! If this building wasn't created by them in the first place then I would have already had someone else do it (for a cheaper price too!) I just wanted to comment on the level of service from some people here in Crossville. I hear this all the time from my clients who are upset because of another technician or business toying with them... rescheduling, or just not showing up at all. I am sorry guys! I promise I try my best to not be like that at CGrafiks!

Hacking Statistics

I heard this statistics on Buzz Out Loud today.

Out of a study of the "Web Hack Incident Database 2008" on 57 incidents total:

1 out of 4 hackers will hack their friends
24% Hack just because they can - to make a stand against something
19% Steal Identity
16% Add malware to a system
13% Steal Money

Tricky Memory Upgrade - HP zv6000

Wow! I had to actually research this one a bit!

I ordered memory for a client who told me over the phone that the laptop was an HP Pavilion dv6000... ( or at least I thought! ). It only had 256mb of RAM with Windows XP, so it was well overdue for an upgrade. After a few days the the memory upgrade came in. I went to install it and found out that the laptop was an HP Pavilion zv6000 not a dv6000 as planned! The dv6000 took DDR2 and the zv6000 takes DDR. Well.. that was ok I guess... I had the other type of memory available at my shop about 10 minutes away, so I left and came back to install the stick of DDR memory. I took the back memory panel off the laptop to find that it only had one DIMM slot to put the RAM in. ... ... I double checked ... and tripple checked! Only 1 slot! Well, I installed a 1024mb stick in this bay, and closed it up - thinking that it was just made with one memory slot. To verify this I went in to BIOS and found the amount of memory that it was recognizing... it was 1280mb. It was seeing an additional 256mb stick in the machine somewhere. Well... I only had the one stick of DDR memory in stock anyhow, so I left it at that and decided to go home and research it. Well.. I found out that I had upgraded the external memory chip but there was still an internal memory chip located somewhere underneath the keyboard. Why would they split the memory locations up like this? It's crazy!~

SERVICE GUIDE HP PAVILION ZV600 http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c00364919.pdf

A POST I FOUND TO HELP: http://www.dinarius.com/commentable/index.php?id=45

A YOUTUBE VIDEO TO REPLACE THE EXTERNAL CHIP: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nbgt5AgzbdE