Re: [PLUG] how to freak out your laptop

[jadoba@jadoba.net]

jeff,

Look and see if the laptop has any available BIOS updates.  My Thinkpad 
T60 was behaving similarly with Parallels and other Virtualization 
suites (VMware, KVM!)...  After flashing the BIOS with an update, the 
laptop works absolutely flawlessly.

Of course, your laptop is an AMD machine, mine is an Intel Core 2 Duo, 
and lots of other differences, so YMMV...

--
James Barrett

On Sun, May 18, 2008 at 06:13:33PM -0400, jeff wrote:
> Dell Latitude D531, Xubuntu Hardy, VMplayer
> 
> 
> I'm minding my own business, messing around with a Win XP VM, when all 
> of the sudden it becomes totally unresponsive.  I thought maybe it 
> needed to catch up with itself, but no, it was foobed.
> 
> Up top I notice that the caps lock and scroll lock lights are blinking. 
>   I know I saw something recently about that but I have the retention of 
> an infant.
> 
> Even Xubuntu was locked.  Ctl-alt-backspace was silent.  Ctl-alt-F6 
> stared at me too.  My most recent standby, ctl-alt-PrntScrn REISUB, also 
> failed me miserably for the first time.  This puppy was LOCKED.
> 
> Manually powered off, rebooted, went back about my business and ten 
> minutes later, the lights were blinking again.  Same thing one more 
> time. At this point, I had maxed out my sense of humor.
> 
> I powered down again, then rebooted and went in search of the cause. 
> Every solution I came across, regardless of Dell system, seemed to 
> involve questionable RAM.  I've had the blinkin' laptop for a few 
> months, I don't play basketball with it, and I've never had a problem 
> with it.  Something told me it wasn't the RAM.
> 
> The laptop did not lock up for the remainder of the evening.  I had 
> stopped using VMplayer.  I suppose it could be any number of things but 
> the only difference yesterday was that I was running my (radio) scanner 
> and controlling it in VM via the serial port.  From what I've read, that 
> shouldn't even begin to be a problem.  Anyone ever hear anything like this?
> 
> ------
> 
> While I'm doing things to my laptop that even Dell can't do, I wanted to 
> ask how to push it further.  The laptop only comes with one serial port. 
>   Most of the scanner control software I've seen is written to use 
> Com1-4, with a few venturing above that.  I can make this work on a pc 
> with additional port cards but not so with XP in a VM.  I have a 
> serial-usb adapter cable but I'm guessing the software won't see it 
> because it's not written to output to usb.  I tried defining COM2 as a 
> usb but it didn't see that either.  [the radio world tends to run a long 
> way behind computers]
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Philadelphia Linux Users Group         --        http://www.phillylinux.org
Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce
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