Action Pants

For a project I am working on I had to hide the "Print Quote for Customer" button located at the top of the Quote form. I found this great script here for taking care of that.

So every since I have had a laptop I have always had an issue with it waking up randomly from standby. I would put it to sleep, place it in my bag and go somewhere with it, and when I pulled it out it was hot because it had been running for some reason. I ended up just shutting it down most of the time because I knew that it wouldn't stay in standby mode. Just recently, I decided to finally find a fix for the problem. After doing a little searching on the web I found this site which resembled my problem. I followed the link to the patch on Microsoft's site, installed it, and now I can put my computer to sleep without worrying about it turning itself on!

I don't make it a full time job but I have a few friends who I'll help out if they're having computer issues. One of my most recent adventures with this involved a 17" Powerbook G4 that wouldn't turn on randomly. Everything seemed to be fine with it when it ran, but sometimes you would turn it off or put it to sleep and it wouldn't turn back on for you.
My friend bought the computer from CompUSA and got the TAP (Total Assurance Plan) with it. However, since CompUSA is closing all of their stores you have to do everything over the phone. Well I called up their tech support number, told the tech what my problem was and they decided that I needed to send it to a repair facility to have the logic board replaced. They sent me the box, I got the box and sent it out for repair. About a week later I got the laptop back and went to go power it up. When I got some feedback from the screen I noticed that there were gray vertical lines running through it. At first I thought it was just a weird glitch that would go away eventually but that wasn't the case. Everything on the screen was discolored and there was no setting I could change to make that any different.
I have an Apple store near by so I made an appointment with one of their Geniuses to see if they could help me out. They hooked the laptop to an external monitor and the video looked fine. So their conclusion was that there was something wrong with the screen.
I made another service request with CompUSA so I could have this issues taken care of. Sadly because of some glitch on their end, it took them about 3 weeks to get me a box. I'm still a bit angry about that but I digress. During this time I hadn't touched the computer. It just sat there on my work bench waiting to go out. I went to go turn it on one day while waiting for the box and found that the screen looked fine. I was very excited but also unsure because technology doesn't just fix it itself.
After playing around with the computer for a little while, I found that applying pressure to the keyboard or to the bottom of the laptop threw the screen either in a working or not working mood. So I could only conclude that when the logic board was replaced something wasn't fully connected or was allowed to get shorted out.
I wish I took pictures of the screen but I never got around to that. Hope my situation is able to help someone in the future.

I work on a Dell Latitude D820. It's got a 2 ghz processor and 2 GB of ram. I am a big fan of Dell, I haven't really had issues in the past with their hardware and when I have had a problem they have taken care of me. The other day I noticed that when I was doing certain things like powering up a virtual machine or watching a movie, my processor would throttle down around 997mhz. I knew that speed wasn't going to work out for me so I went and downloaded a program called SpeedSwitch to try and force my power settings to keep the processor up to speed. I had used this program in the past with other laptops when I wanted to get the best performance from the machine when on battery. After playing around with settings and some restarting I was still getting the same response from the processor when doing somewhat intensive things. I then decided to contact Dell's online support and see if they could shed any light on my issues. They ran me through flashing the BIOS back to a previous version as well as disabling all non-essential applications on startup. None of this fixed the problem. I have Dell's in home service so they went ahead and scheduled a tech to come out to my place and replace the processor because it seemed to be faulty. The day the tech was suppose to come, I decided to take my laptop off the dock and spray it out a little in preparation for it be taken apart. After I did that and booted it back up. It worked fine. It seemed that there was enough dust in the computer to inhibit the cooling of the processor. I didn't thing that could ever be a problem, but the symptoms all make sense when you apply that situation. I just thought I would share my experience for anyone that might run into a similar situation.

So I am working on a project that involves making a Sharepoint WebPart. I have the functionality down but it looks like crap. Now I could bug someone to help me make it look pretty, but I think I am going to bite the bullet and figure out this whole CSS thing. I keep doing projects that work, but look horrible and it's got to stop. On a side note Bamboo Solutions makes really good stuff from what i can tell. I had to find a way to get data from a SQL Database into sharepoint and they have from what can tell the only solution to do this. Access 2007 has a feature built into but I found it too be very memory intensive with large sets of data. I don't normally push a product unless I like it, so yea if you need to get data into sharepoint, they would be the way to go.