WingTips

iQon 8050Q

My last post reminded me, you can download advent drivers with the tech guys too!

We had one of these laptops in yesterday. It’s taken me two days to find the bloody drivers.

They’re only found at one place: The Tech Guys. And searching their site took me 20 minutes.

The laptop looks quite smart, but for format/reinstall, it’s a pain. There’s a hidden partition which I assume is for a restore, but there’s no apparant way to access it (I’ve tried every effing F key, and tried the classic ‘push every button and see what happens’ method.

If anyone knows how to access it, drop me a line!

Fa la la la la, la la la la.

You can tell Mercury is retrograde. The past two weeks we’ve had so many identical problems on totally different machines. And those that aren’t the same as another are completely and utterly obscure. Like the ACER laptop who’s mouse and keyboard won’t work when the battery is plugged in. Most of the hardware issues that aren’t user caused are borked hard drives which all show the same symptoms - PC/laptop in a reboot loop. Partitions become corrupt, data cannot be retrieved because the paritions are corrupt.

The only other problem we’ve had in is viruses. WinAntiVirus Pro 200x usually.

Why do people still think that giving details and money away to a random company that installed it’s own software on their PC is a good idea?

What would you do if someone came up to your house, smashed a window, knocked a door and went “’scuse me love, your window’s broken. Give me $937 dollars and I’ll replace it for you.”? You certainly wouldn’t hand over your wallet.

We had a customer who thought he was paying $50 dollars to this company to remove their bogus virus software..he ended up losing over $120 dollars and can’t trace the company it went to. Silly, silly man.

If you want more info on fake antivirus software and how to spot it, try somewhere like Scambusters. And use your head.

The best things in life are free. At least as far as antivirus go. I use a free one, AVG. Before that, I used another free one - Avast. Sure, they have commercial software too, with bells and whistles on, but the standard free software works really well. If in doubt, google a software’s name, if it’s a bogus one, believe me, there’ll be plenty of complaints about it. Or if all else fails, ask me. I see enough of them in work.

On another, less ranty note, but only slightly, I’m going to be hosting service manuals here for download. Various times I’ve needed access to one at work for a laptop/printer, and had to spend hours trawling the web for one teensy bit of information. I absolutely abhor these sites that sell service manuals and drivers that are often available for free, and have to sift my way through enough when looking for one manual. To sell information when it can be given away? Against the spirit of the internet imho.

<mumble> besides, I begrudge paying $25+ dollars for a manual from which I only need one piece of information for a laptop that doesn’t even belong to me and I may never use again. Grr.

So keep an eye out for my downloads page soon.

I have access to a huge amount of drivers too, so if you’re missing something, leave a comment.