Got Acer eMachines e727 repaired

-
This is my first laptop which I bought way back in Aug-2010. Thats about seven years now - and over the years it's catastrofically failed twice. Once about three years back it's mainboard died, I got it replaced for about 8000/-. And found out the power brick was dead too. Ok. Another 800/- bucks got me a non-brand Adapter. OK. It worked for a year since, and then one sunny day died again. I bought a Lenovo G405S for about 19000/- rupees and didn't bother to get this one fixed. It stayed in a box up with some junk for a while. A fortnight ago I got the other laptop - a Lenovo G480 which my sister uses now exclusively - repaired for 2200/- because I managed to get it wet and fried. 
So I decided to see if I can get this old Acer Junk repaired. Gave it to the Repair center - the guy quoted 1800/- Rs, I okayed. Got it yesterday, also got an original Acer Adapter for 1550/- Rs too. Don't want to take another chance with no-brand junk. So the laptop is now repaired. Got it home, and watched few movies. The battery is dead incidently, but doesn't matter - I plan to use it for watching movies/tv series etc only. Then I thought of upgrading Ubuntu on it. 
Took me an hour to get the Live USB done correctly -the old versions of Universal USB Installer and Unetbootin I have don't work with Ubuntu 17.04 anymore. So dug around and found Rosa Image Writer - it worked and I went on to install. Turns out the HDD is gone too - multiple bad sectors - the installer crashed. After hacking at it a few times I couldn't get it to work. Thankfully I didn't have any data on it. Funny thing is the SMART Data goes ok. Existing NTFS partition mounts okay. Only when I try to write big amount of data - like in an OS Install - it screams failure. 
Now I said screw it, and just wanted to use the Live USB to watch the Movies. But this laptop being ancient - yeah Seven full years old to date - has only two USB ports. One is taken by Live USB, other by the portable HDD which has the media, and the touchpad is broke, so I don't have a mouse anymore - unless I get a third USB port and connect the wireless KBD/Mouse I have. But no third USB Port and so I'm stuck now. 
Still managed to watch about four movies using the half-broken keyboard only. Still if I want to transfer anything from my Cellphone, which has only MTP - screw Google - I'm stuck since I don't have anywhere to paste these. So now my options are - either get a new HDD for about 3000Rs - or get a USB Hub for 300Rs and continue using the Live USB. I guess I'm going to be getting a USB Hub soon.
Damn, but this sucks!!!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Morning Quotes

-
Image
Source: www.brainyquote.com   I may be drunk, Miss, but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly. Winston Churchill   Prayer is the key of the morning and the bolt of the evening. Mohandas Gandhi   I look upon death to be as necessary to our constitution as sleep. We shall rise refreshed in the morning. Benjamin Franklin  
Read more

QCalendarWidget CSS Stylesheeting

-
Recently I had to implement a calendar for a TouchScreen application. I resorted to css to modify the calendar widget's appearance so that it would be more accessible. Following is the code that enabled me to get a proper calendar. calendar->setStyleSheet("QMenu { font-size:20px; width: 300px; left: 20px; }"     "QToolButton {icon-size: 48px, 48px; font: 20px; height: 70px; width: 100px; }"     "QAbstractItemView {selection-background-color: rgb(255, 174, 0);}"     "QToolButton::menu-indicator{ width: 50px;}"     "QToolButton::menu-indicator:pressed,"     "QToolButton::menu-indicator:open{ top:10px; left: 10px;}"     "QTableView { font: 30px; }"     "QSpinBox { width: 100px; font: 20px;}"     "QSpinBox::up-button { width:40px;}"     "QSpinBox::down-button { width:40px;}");
Read more

Selecting new phone plan

-
I use a Reliance Jio SIM as my one and only cellphone number. I used to have another, but I found little use for that. So I discontinued that other SIM card. It was a Vodafone SIM and I had bought it thinking I would be using it when I visit my hometown. Turns out it's not usable there. So adios. Coming back to Jio, it was working so far so good for a while. And it was quite cheap. Then they increased the fares about 4-5 months ago. And it was costing ~Rs 7 per day. This was for unlimited Jio-Jio calling, ~300minutes free to other telcos, and 1.5GB daily cellular data. Now I got home internet, so I thought to cut costs on this. The current plan goes for INR555 for 84 days. This includes 1.4GB 4G cellular data per day, 300 min calling to other telcos, and jio-jio free. That's Rs 6.6 per day. Now I'm not even using 30minutes calling per day. And due to home internet my cellular usage has gone down. So I decided to go for some other cheaper plan. This one is INR1299 for 336 da...
Read more