How to Deal with a Laptop Spill

What to Do if You Spill Something on Your Laptop

Ok, it’s happened to most of us at some point. The lads are over, you’re playing ace-king suited on a $5000 pot and in the excitement someone (you never exactly figure out who) spills a pint of lager onto the laptop keyboard.

So what do you do? Throw a towel over it and play on, hoping for the best (and in no way prepared to throw away the hand for the sake of a little spill)? Well, not if you want your laptop to work the next time you try to turn it on. Trust me, take it from someone who knows from experience, you want to deal with this properly, and fast, if you want to prevent serious damage to your laptop. You need to act quickly.

Here's what to do:

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Access to the rest of this tutorial requires free registration. I will tell you exactly what to do if you spill something on your laptop. Following my instructions will help to prevent serious damage from occurring, I can promise you. I have dealt with this exact problem enough times to know what needs to be done!


Sean Loewen,
Owner,
The PC GP Computer Services


Visit my website: Computer and Laptop Repairs and Services for Home and Small Business

How to test your laptop charger

Ok, something we have been seeing a lot of lately is faulty AC adapters (aka laptop chargers) causing wild and wonderful (not wonderful at all, actually) problems with laptops. These problems can vary from odd touchpad activity, like jumping, dancing, jigging mouse pointers, to random crashes, to freezing, hanging, puking (not really), and lots more. In some cases laptops turn on, but nothing comes up on the screen. Now while these problems can be caused by other things as well, what we've been finding is that faulty chargers can be the root cause of all these problems and more, and so we have had to make it policy in the workshop to always test laptop chargers whenever there is a fault with a laptop in for repair or service, and even when they are working perfectly, as a faulty charger can cause a slow degradation of sensitive electronic components inside your laptop, eventually leading to fault or even failure.

So, the purpose of this post is to show you how to test your laptop charger. I'm hoping to do a video on this at some point, maybe later today, so watch for that.

There are only 3 things you need to carry out this test. First, you need a laptop charger. Secondly, you will need a standard voltmeter or circuit tester that can test DC and AC voltage. This test will not measure the maximum power output (i.e. amps) of your charger, but if you want to know how to measure the draw on your charger by your laptop, leave a comment and I will do a brief tutorial on that. Thirdly, you need an earth or ground connection. The easiest place to get this is the 3rd or middle socket on a wall outlet. Make sure as you are using the right one, as there is a chance of electric shock if you use the wrong one! 230 volts out of a wall socket can be lethal, so make sure you know which one is the earth or ground or you could end up making yourself crispy! You can also use the bare copper surface of a radiator pipe, or any other wire or terminal you know for sure is earthed. This is very important as without a proper earth connection you will not be able to detect a particular type of fault with your charger, and that which is most potentially harmful (and difficult to detect), the deadly 'AC ripple'. Yes, I know, it sounds like some kind of geeky ice cream flavour. But believe me, it is very real, and very tasty. I mean harmful.

The first test is a standard DC voltage check. This test makes sure your charger is supplying the correct DC (direct current) voltage to the laptop. Check on the bottom of your charger to make sure it uses standard polarity. At the laptop end of your charger is what we call the jack. This is the little plug that goes into your laptop. Well, the jack has a tip, and a ring. The tip is the hole in the middle. The ring is the outside metal piece. Unless you have a Dell or HP laptop which uses a slightly different jack, one which has a thin metal pin in the middle of a metal cylinder, like this:

Or if you have an Apple computer, in which case, you're on the wrong blog. What do you think I am, some kind of Apple GP? Yeesh. No but seriously, if you want to test either of these, leave a comment and I'll see what the ol' doctor can whip up for you.

Anyways, what was I talking about before the digression. Ah yes, tip and ring. So if you don't have one of the weird plugs mentioned above, yours will have a tip and ring at the laptop end. With standard polarity, the tip (or center hole) is positive and the ring (or outer metal casing) is negative. The two types of polarity are indicated by the symbols below. Positive polarity is standard, negative polarity is non-standard (well, in my books anyway, I am sure some will argue), and if you look on the bottom of your charger you should see one of these symbols indicating the polarity used.

Set your voltmeter to DC voltage. If your charger uses positive polarity, you put the positive or red terminal in the center hole and the negative or black terminal on the outside. If it uses negative polarity it's the other way around, black in the middle and red outside. If your charger is plugged in and working you should get a reading, probably somewhere between 15 and 20 volts. Check the rating for output voltage, this should be written on the bottom of your charger. If it is out by more than 1 volt, there is cause for concern and you should consider replacing your charger. Check the battery in your voltmeter first though, it could be low if the reading is high. Confused yet? Ok, on to the ice cream test.

What we are testing for in the second test is what has been affectionately dubbed 'AC ripple'. Well now in fairness I didn't coin this term, I believe it is not in fact the correct technical term (maybe it is, anyone?) but that is what Martin Mulholland called it when he first told me about this particular phenomenon and the name has stuck since. What happens most often is the rectifier or smoothing circuit in the charger blows or degrades, and as a result the AC current is not completely converted or smoothed and some of the alternating current comes through. Fortunately the AC voltage is detectable, however it is done so in a strange way. Set your voltmeter to measure AC voltage now, between 1 and 100 volts or less than 200 volts is usually an appropriate setting. Here is where you will need your reliable earth or ground connection. You also have to perform this test in both directions, i.e. first using positive to earth, and then negative to earth, because sometimes it is only detectable in one direction, not sure why as it is AC, perhaps something to do with the diode bank, not sure. I will explain further exactly how this is done.

Make sure your charger is plugged in and working. First we will place the black terminal on earth and the red terminal on the negative part of the laptop plug. Check your voltmeter. You should see 0 volts. If you see 1 volt it is a minor fault, if you see anything above that, you should seriously consider replacing the charger. Now switch the terminals around, connecting the red or positive terminal to earth, and the black to the negative part of the laptop plug coming off the charger. Again, you should see 0 volts; if you see 1 volt it is a minor fault, if you see anything above that, you should seriously consider replacing the charger.Your laptop may be working fine now, but any AC current coming through could potentially be very high amps and will most likely do damage to your motherboard or other components.

If your laptop is not working properly or behaving erratically, I strongly recommend you test your charger. If you detect any of the issues mentioned above, either incorrect DC output or and detectable AC readings using the methods described above, try replacing the charger. At the very least it will extend the life of your laptop to use a charger with the correct output (volts and amps) and 0 AC coming through. And remember, if your laptop battery isn't charging, it could be that your laptop charger isn't supplying enough power to both run the laptop and charge the battery.

Please comment if you have any questions for me! I'm always happy to help.


Sean Loewen
Owner
The PC GP Computer Services

Visit my website:

Computer and Laptop Repairs and Services for Home and Small Business

Free performance increase for your computer or laptop

Ok, this is one of my favourite and and often-used tips to squeeze that extra bit of power out of your system. It's just a couple of simple system changes that will make your windows open quicker and generally improve the day-to-day performance of your computer. This works on Windows 2000, XP, and Vista.

Right-click 'My computer', and on the pop-up menu left-click 'Properties'. This opens the System Properties window, which can also be opened by double-clicking 'System' in the control panel. The first thing to do is note the amount of RAM in your system, which should be displayed on the 'General' tab of System Properties nearly at the bottom of the window under the heading 'Computer'. Write down the amount of RAM in your system, you will need this later. Now in System Properties click on the Advanced tab. Under the 'Performance' heading, click Settings, which will open the 'Performance Settings' window (remember how you got here - you will need to open it again later). Now on Visual Effects, click to select the 'Adjust for best performance' radio button. Now click Apply. After a few seconds, you will notice the appearance of your task bar and windows will change. This reduces the amount of memory required to render your desktop and open windows, thereby increasing the amount of free memory available for other things, and speeding up the time it takes to open a new window. If you like it better the other way you can change it back to 'Let windows choose what's best for my computer', or for the not-faint-of-heart, you can select 'Custom' and tweak the options to your heart's content.

Now moving on to virtual memory settings. First, open 'Performance Settings' again (refer to the above steps for how to get there). From here we want to click the 'Advanced' tab, then down at the bottom of this window, under 'Virtual memory' click 'Change'. Make sure your system drive (usually C:) is selected above, and then click to select the 'Custom size' radio button. This is where you will need to know the amount of RAM you have (if you remember, you should have noted this earlier in the first step above). I recommend you set the custom virtual memory to somewhere between 2 and 4 times the amount of RAM you have in your system. So, if you have 1GB of RAM, set the virtual memory to 2000MB or 4000MB. Also, make sure you set the initial size and the maximum size to the same value. What this does is it causes the operating system to allocate a fixed amount of disk space for the virtual memory, which saves the time that it would otherwise take increasing the page file size when more virtual memory is needed, and then decreasing it again when the usage drops. The only problem with doing this occurs when you are low on disk space. You will need as much free space on your hard drive as the amount of memory you allocate to virtual memory, and this space on your hard drive will become unusable and so it will appear as though you have that much less free space on your drive. With modern computers we're seeing hard drives of 160GB, 250GB, 320GB and above and for these systems with general use there should be lots of free space on the hard drive. However, with older systems (which generally will see improved performance more using this trick), unfortunately the hard drives are often smaller (80GB, 60GB, 40GB, and perhaps less, depending on how old the computer is) and you may be running low on free space. If this is the case, your system will most likely improve greatly with a hard drive and/or memory upgrade. After you've set your initial and max virtual memory sizes, click the Set button, then Ok, and then on the window behind click Apply and Ok. That's it, your system should be that bit quicker now. You may need to restart the computer for the changes to take effect.

I really hope these little tricks prove useful to you. As always, please feel free to comment or contact me through my website if you have any questions or if there is anything I can do to help.

Yours,

Sean Loewen
Owner
The PC GP Computer Services

Visit my website:

Computer and Laptop Repairs and Services for Home and Small Business

How to avoid getting ripped off - internet style

Ok, a client of mine was contacted by someone offering to book a tour with him (he's a tour guide) for 10 people and they wanted to give him a deposit of €2,000. Their accomodation was €8,000 but there was a problem paying for the accomodation, so they said, and hence they asked my friend to process a credit card transaction for €10,000 and then to pass on the overpayment of €8,000 to the hotel on their behalf. All the emails were very genuine and coming from an apparently legitimate source. This is a common scam, the overpayment deal, where the con sends you more than the cost of whatever goods or service, and you then give them the balance back in cash or else make a payment to a third party. This is a great way to launder money or use stolen credit card details. Always be on the lookout for this one! It's a classic scam.

Here's a great video about this very common scam:




Sean Loewen
Owner
The PC GP Computer Services

Visit my website:

Computer and Laptop Repairs and Services for Home and Small Business

The best backups are the ones you actually do

Hi, welcome to my new blog. This is where I'll be sharing as much as possible, the many ways of preventing the regular computer and laptop problems I see regularly, how to get the most out of your computer or laptop, and other tips and tricks that I hope you will find useful.

I enjoy using computers, when they are working properly. When they aren't working properly, they can be the most frustrating appliance ever inflicted upon the human being.

I thought I'd start this blog with something about backups. A lot of people talk about or think about doing backups. I just want to mention that this is a fairly useless activity, the futility of which becomes most apparent when you turn on your computer or laptop and the hard drive has mysteriously died at some point since the last time you used it. What this means, of course, is that all your data is irretrievably lost (let's assume major platter damage), and you have no backup copy. Now, aren't you glad you talked about doing backups? If you have data that is important, YOU MUST BACK UP REGULARLY!

That said, there's a very handy and free backup program called SyncBack, which you can program to automatically do a backup, from any drive in your computer or network, to any drive, network folder, external hard drive, memory key, or even FTP location. And, the best feature (for me anyway) is that it will also automatically email you a report when the backup is completed, or if it fails to run for any reason. Anyway, the name is SyncBack, click here to download this most excellent free backup software. It's free, it's totally safe, I've recommended it and installed it for clients literally dozens or possibly hundreds of times, and have always found it brilliant and spot-on. This is not an affiliate link and I'm not making any money whatsoever of the sale or recommendation of this software.

Ok, that's my tip for today. I hope you've found this useful, hope you have a wonderful day and thanks for reading.

Sean Loewen
Owner
The PC GP Computer Services

Visit my website:

Computer and Laptop Repairs and Services for Home and Small Business