Category Archives: Hardware

Fixed HP Compaq 6715b Power Issue?

Posted on by
Reply

I had a HP Compaq 6715b laptop lying around which I thought was dead. When pressing the power button, nothing happened, not lights, no beeps, nothing at all.

I came across a hint which seems to be a well-known fix for such issues: unplug the power cord, remove the battery and press the power button for a long time (I did it for around 30s). Afterwards, I connected the power cord without putting the battery back in. Surprise, surprise: the laptop powers up without a problem (after having reconnected the hard drive which I removed ages ago to copy the data).

If this really fixes the problem for good will have to been seen. There are reports on the internet about low-quality motherboards (especially power connection) in the HP laptops of this generation.

Set up Brother MFC-7820N as network scanner under Kubuntu

Posted on by
1

I’ve set up my Brother MFC-7820N ages ago to print and scan over the network from Kubuntu. Once in a while the router decides to change the IPs of my network devices. So just as a note to myself, here’s how to set up the scanner again:

  • check the setup: brsaneconfig2 -q
  • delete the old entry: brsaneconfig2 -r MFC-7820N
  • determine new IP (as an exercise for the reader)
  • set up new entry: brsaneconfig2 -a name=MFC-7820N model=MFC-7820N ip=192.168.1.35

See also Brother’s guide.

Disable Services on MBWE

Posted on by
10

I’ve been using Western Digital’s MyBook World Edition (white light) for the last half a year or so. Until recently, everything worked fine but last week I noticed that the disk doesn’t spin down anymore. There seems to be constant activity on the device. Using ssh to log in, I noticed that there are quite a lot of services running which I thought I had disabled previously, including twonkymediaserver and miocrawler.

Continue reading →