Create a kick ass development and reading environment

Almost since a two years now. I have the luxury of having three monitors available to me at work. Being a graphics developer it was essential to have large and beautiful screens and screen space that I could use effectively.


At work I primarily develop web based applications.
This means I often have an application to run, a development environment and a browser or mail client running simultaneously.

I also sometimes was to debug an application or remote into production and watch server logs without interrupting my current development work flow.

I even watched the E3 press conference while developing at work.

I have often struggled to create a similar environment at home due to the following reasons.

• High cost involved in buying a monitor that Rotates to either portrait or landscape mode.
• These "pivot monitors" usually run at around 250$ for 20 inch.
  
• Not enough table space to keep my laptop and tow other monitors on the same desk

After my recent dissection of my Dell e1505, I decided to fix this problem at home. I initially wanted to buy another monitor to partner my existing one. I have an Acer2016W LCD monitor that works fine. After researching a bit I couldn't find any monitor that would pivot for <265$,>

I decided then that I need to use my current monitor and find a way to match it with either an available LCD mount or a compatible spare.


I found one at dell.com that was adequately priced just 45$, I applied a couple of coupons from dell and got another 10$ off. You can find the mount here


I could find similarly priced options at ebay as well.


After ripping the base off my old monitor, it wasnt as straigt forward as i thought, I mounted the NeoFlex mount onto the screen.

Remaining steps involved reconfiguring my desk space and ordering a KVM switch.
I now have two laptops and three desktops all in my room (yea one windows vista, one ubuntu and a power mac G4). I will write about my room in another blog article.


Finally after downloading older ATI Mobility Radeon X1400 Catalyst driver for my Dell e1505, I got the screen rotation or pivot to work.

An now behold I have visual studio configured exactly as per spec my requirements.





There are several advantages of having portrait mode screen.

• I can now see roughly 90 lines of code apart from a solution explorer contains 3 project fully expanded in visual studio
• Reading PDF files beacomes easy as it feels like a page.
• Browsing forums and reading blogs becomes much easier as i can quickly scan most of the page without having to scroll up and down multiple times.
  

Total Cost of the project 45$. Total satisfaction : priceless

How to get a new laptop ...... from the old one for 50$

Continuing on my last post on fixing my old laptop.

I was buying a laptop for a HP pavillion laptop for my friend. I was looking forward to buy myself a laptop once I ordered his.

I found that the industry is moving towards only a two screen resolutions 1366x768 and 1980x1080.
I started looking for a laptop that matched my needs.


To my surprise I found that a laptop that matched my current 3 year old laptop configuration was selling on dell for $600+ taxes + 50 dollars recycling fee in California. That was turning out to $720.

Click here to check it out.



Moreover I was surprised at the screen resolutions they offered, my old dell laptop has resolution of 1440x900 which seems almost perfect 1600xHHHH would be ideal for me. I could not find a laptop that would actually fit my needs


I was using the new hp laptop i just ordred for my friend and the resolution seemed too low at first. 1080p seemed to high on my external monitor, so no hope on a 15 inch laptop screen.

I decided then to see what I could do with my laptop.

If you have read my post many of you might know I have been doing.

Here are a lit of things I needed to make myself happy.

• New system fan
• New battery as my 3 year old battery couldn't keep my laptop running for more than 10 seconds
• A new keyboard as my keyboard was not really soft after 3 years.

I started a search on by ebay desktop application.
you can get it here and I recommend it for all frequent ebay users.

http://desktop.ebay.com/


Anyway here were the three things I found on ebay ....













Total cost of the operation 10 +38 + 5 = 53 dollars.

And also got a 9 cell battery instead of the current 6 cell.


I would encourage every one to look at fixing their old laptop before investing heavily into a new one.

Remember one important information... Almost anything on the laptop can be replaced and even upgraded.

Dell Inspiron E1505 Laptop CPU 100% issues

Around six months ago my laptop started mibehaving so badly that i stopped using it completely.

Symptoms

• After a while of using the laptop, it would show CPU usage at 100%
• Even when there was nothing being run

Today i got time to work on getting my laptop back to a running state.


I initially started suspecting the fan/heatsink issue

I ran Speedfan and noticed the following temperature
You can get Speedfan from here

• On boot the temperature was about 37 C
• After a hour of playing videos it bumped up to 63 C
• After an hour and half it bumped up to 75 C

I finally decided to open the laptop to see if the fan was running at all

Thanks to dell for a great service manual that walked me through the steps
(this wasnt the first time i was opening a laptop but it ain't for a noob)

You can find the service manual for Dell Inspiron E1505/6400 here


After stripping it to bare bones.
I found that the system fan wasn't even moving, noticed that there was dust collected that was stopping the fan from moving.

Used an air duster from fry's to clear the dust out completely.
You can get it here



The motor seems to have got fried on the fan since it was restricted to not move at all.

Now the systems seems to be running fine after replacing the fan with one from an older toshiba laptop..


I couldn't find any help on this and hence wrote one for the community.