Re-Acer-ing

Man, did I scare my Acer or did it scare me? Well, it didn’t quite scare me as much as it made me furious. It shut down on me twice in a span of 2 hours due to over-heating during early morning hours of 11th July. I’ve known for nearly a year that there is a problem with its fan such that the cooling of the CPU & the Motherboard is not that efficient and over time over-heating occurs and then BLIP, the laptop goes blank. But that could be prevented till now by invoking CPU / Memory / Graphics-intensive jobs less frequently; like watching YouTube videos continuously for less than an hour or so. That made my Acer work more or less for roughly 12 hours a day with occasional blips now & then. No big deal for both of us!

Then 7/11 came and changed all that. (For the reason, read the above paragraph again!) In my rage, I decided that I’m going to literally break the back cover and rip out the fan and do whatever is necessary to get my Acer working longer shifts again. I need to tell you now that why I hadn’t done anything about the fan till now if I knew about the problem since last year. Well, you see… One of the screws of the back cover got chipped when I tried to open it last year and just wouldn’t budge! So I left it at that because it was working fine as long as I did my part. But now it was way past doing my part! I’ll tell you why: I’ve installed Windows 8 Release Preview (apart from full-fledged Win7) on it and Win8 can barely run for ½ an hour on it even when no programs / apps are running! I don’t know what Win8 does in background but if that’s enough to over-heat my laptop, it needs to learn something! That something is that Win8 is staying whether or not Acer likes it.

So, where were we? Yes, I was determined to break the back cover of my Acer. But just in case, I brought out my trusty ‘+’-headed screwdriver, pressed it hard against that chipped screw and gave a mighty twist to it. Lo & behold, that chipped screw loosened! My joy knew no bounds and I like to believe my Acer was in similar situation. From then on, there was nothing stopping me. Out came all the other screws, out came the back cover to reveal:

Then out came more screws holding the fan (the pictures are anachronistic and you can guess the reason… I mean who thinks of writing a post while thinking about breaking through a laptop!) and then the fan itself:

I dislodged the fan as you can see above and do you see that horizontal vent below in the case housing the fan:

Inside which you will also see the blades of the fan… Well, you couldn’t see those blades before. That view was obstructed by the strip of lint (consisting mainly of dust, dirt, hairs, webs, spiders, bugs, etc.) of thickness ~3-4mm seen below:

The pattern you see is because of the metallic mesh that can be seen on the right side of the second photo above.

Ignore the poor focus in this photo and don’t ask me about the pattern of the strip. So this strip was obstructing the air-flow completely and making my poor Acer heat up so much that it could barely operate for an hour. I also need to make a special mention of an important tool, which helped me clean the fan:

The very versatile blower that I got for my E-PL1… Well, now that my Acer is cleaned, it has never shut down again due to over-heating. It has shut down twice since 7/11 but that’s definitely not due to over-heating. That must be Win7’s problem because now I’ve been running Win8 also a lot and watching videos for more than an hour continuously and the temperature of CPU & motherboard never even reaches 60°C! Earlier it used to hover around 70°C even when my Acer was idle! To prove that, here’s a snapshot of Speccy while Mathematica is running a CPU / RAM-intensive program (in W7, obviously!):

So, Random Shutdown score for Win7 - $2$ vs. Win8 - $0$. I was lucky to know the problem beforehand but in general how do you

Troubleshoot PC Problems

The Very Eccentric…

Nodame… I have been watching episodes of the anime ‘Nodame Cantabile’ recently (He said ‘start watching this one, you will like it’) and after watching the episode named ‘Past’, I have become a huge fan of Nodame.

She is unique in her own ways, the way she carries herself, eats, dresses up, plays, cares, performs, loves, walks, speaks, cooks, cleans, works – everything is just so her.

Look at the picture below.

Nodame has magnetic, long, beautiful, slender hands and fingers and when she performs on the piano, you feel so connected to the whole thing that even if you are one who has no clue of what music is all about, you will fall for it.

And the next one.

This is how she reacts when she is under-estimated / scolded by her superior Chiaki whom she addresses as Chiaki-Senpai. Her eyes are wide open, as if she has understood the whole thing and a great realization has dawned upon her and the biting of nails reflects her nervousness and the wish to come out of the whole situation.

And the next one.

This is how Nodame looks when she is angry. She has water in her eyes, shouts on the top of her voice, her hairs go swirling and she looks puzzled, confused and irritated.

And the next one.

This picture is after the graduation party when Chiaki and Nodame start walking back home (well… they are neighbours and Nodame is generally fed by Chiaki at his apartment) and they keep dancing and enjoying themselves. It is a very pleasant sight to watch. Both of them get connected to music and the beautiful morning sight interspersed with their brilliant dance moves makes the whole scenario very exciting.

And the last-but-one one.

This is when Chiaki challenges Nodame and later both of them play on the Piano. It is not just great watching them play together but also knowing that 1+1 definitely make more than 2 (in terms of synergy) because the music which comes out is beyond all comprehension.

And the final one.

This shows the shabby/mangy nature of Nodame. When Chiaki figures out that she doesn’t clean her house regularly, keeps things disordered, that she keeps her hair dirty and doesn’t change her dress for a week, he starts working at her place. It makes me believe, at least for a while that good people do exist in the world.

Watching Nodame is amazing, to say the least! And this is one of the very beautiful title track that comes at the end of every episode and here is the translated version copied from the anime.

When love is painful
I noticed it when I was next to you that night
Because I know about you
More than anyone else does
That unintentional…
Kindness of yours, was squeezing my heart
Even though, Even though I'm watching you from this close
Why is it? Why is it that we are still friends?
No matter, No matter how much I think of you
My feelings never reach. You don't understand
I'm so in love with you.
Everyday, Everyday my heart is in pain
Making it through countless nights where I couldn't sleep
The first time, the first time we met each other,
If only I could go back to that day.
I'm so in love with you.

I’m looking forward to watching the remaining episodes and seeing Nodame do very well in whatever she does (Teaching or playing Piano).

Return of…

… Sketchbook! Or of Musashi Quality with a scanlation of first 2 chapters of volume 8. I was so excited that I put up a comment on their site with a typo, which my Superpartner brought to my attention!

How much more humiliating can it be? Well, their typesetter has made two typos in the 15 or so pages, which is then comforting at some level! But irritating at the same time… Anyway, the themes of the strips are more or less the same as usual and this strip is definitely post-worthy:

Talking of photographing bugs, my father spotted an interesting bug – a stark red specimen. It was climbing a wall and the macro mode of my E-PL1 was not co-operating enough. But I was able to get  a very sharp focussed image after 10’s of trials. Here’s that image which was taken at nearly the end of my KTM trip. It had remained in my camera for all that time till now so you’re the first one to lay your eyes on it if someone else hasn’t already seen this folder:

The photo is in a wrong orientation so you have to imagine the floor surface being the wall! Anyway, help me in identifying

The Red Bugger

Green Light

A rare event! A rare sight!

Or so I thought! Apparently, the green light (flash) during sunset lasts for a few seconds only whereas the light I saw lasted for a few minutes. Also the not-so-good quality of the photos (it’s R’s camera, after all!) may make you squint to see the ‘green-ness’ that I’m talking about. Anyway, here are some more photos to distract you from the above:

The patterns of smoke & clouds are interesting. The only problem is you can’t make them out in the photo!

And here we see everything (only if you already know that they exist): Green Light, Light Streaks, Cloud Patterns and Mountain Tops. I guess the only good thing that you can take away from this post is some knowledge about

Green Flash