Thinkpad Edge E530 won't wake up from sleep

I recently purchased a Thinkpad Edge E530 laptop from Lenovo. I think it is great value. I ordered it with the default 2GB RAM and bumped it up to a nice pair of Kingston HyperX 4GB DDR3 RAM, bringing the total up to 8GB. The whole thing costs me only about S$600.

But there was only one problem with the laptop. It wouldn't wake up from sleep or hibernate properly. I have to force power off the machine and boot it up again after sleep. I tried everything. Updating the BIOS. Updating the drivers. Nothing worked. It was frustrating.

After a tedious round of elimination testing, the culprit was finally tracked down to a HDD caddy that I purchased from DealExtreme. This is one of those gadgets that lets you install another harddisk into your space-scarce laptop by using the slot reserved for the optical drive. I use it to add a 120GB SSD drive into the laptop and use it to run certain I/O intensive applications (eg. virtual machines).

As luck would have it, I chanced upon a discussion in NotebookReview.com that talks about this issue on another laptop (but also involves a HDD caddy). I am not particularly knowledgeable about the hardware details, but apparently one of the pins (diagnostic SATA pin) is wrongly connected to ground and needs to be disconnected.

I am not very good with the soldering iron, and anyway the pads are spaced too closely together for my meager soldering skill. So armed with a small tweezer and a sewing needle, I set about trying to destroy the pin in question. Thankfully the pin itself is rather thin, so it didn't take long. A couple of minutes later, I had a clean break.

I put everything back together and powered on the laptop. Taking in a deep breath, I click on "Sleep". Hurray! The red LED on the laptop started to pulse, which indicates it is sleeping. Pressing the power button brought the laptop back to life, just as it was intended to. I couldn't be happier! Thanks to the wonderful folks who shared this piece of knowledge!

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Make Google Chrome Portable the system default browser

Making Chrome Portable the system default browser turned out to be more complicated than I'd expected.

I am currently running Windows 7 x64. I first tried Change Default Browser, which seems to be the tool recommended by everybody, but that didn't work for some reason. I tried a few other methods, but none of them worked. Finally I found salvation in this discussion, in the last post made by jonasformolo.

What is needed is to created the chrome.reg file, then fire up the text editor and replace all occurrences of:

  D:\\Softwares\\Portable\\Extracted\\GoogleChromePortable\\GoogleChromePortable.exe

with the full path to Chrome Portable on your system (mind the double backslashes!). Finally double-click to enter it into the registry.

However, there is one additional and crucial step to take which is missing in the original instructions. Since you can't easily edit the value in:

  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\GoogleChromePortableURL\shell\open\command

with a text editior (unless you have the unusual skill of being able to edit Unicode strings in pure hex), you need to fire up REGEDIT to change the path value.

Now run "Control Panel" and select "Default Programs". If you have done everything right so far, you should see this:

Now simply click on "Set this program as default", and Chrome Portable will be set as the system default browser.

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Best Android Apps

There are a thousand lists of "top apps" out there.  SO, why write another one?  Because virtually every app list I've seen is full of truly awful apps.   My only conclusion is that syndicated bloggers and so-called "news" sites are "in-bed" with app developers to promote certain apps.

My obscurity in the blogosphere ensures that my app-list will be based on merit.  The apps I am listing here are exclusively apps I enjoy using.

Corey's Top 10 Android Apps

1. Enhanced Email ($)
2. Launcher Pro ($)
3. Dolphin HD 
4. Weather Bug Elite ($)
5. Fast Reboot Pro ($)
6. Advanced Task Killer
7. Slacker Radio
8. Tiny Flashlight + LED
9. WiFi Analyzer
10. Alarm Clock Plus 

There are a ton of games available on the Android, but many of them are ruined by one of three forms of monetizing the game:  push ads, in-game ads, and in-game item purchase. In the case of the first two, there are a couple of handy apps to help squash these.

To identify games with "push ads", you can use these apps:

• AirPush Detector
• TrustGo Ad Detector
• Lookout Security Premium

To disable ads altogether on rooted phones, you can use the "AdFree" app.  That said, it doesn't disable the advertisement space, it just makes it so the pictures don't show-up.  Which, is mostly what I'm worried about, because I hate those types of distractions.

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Turning off numerical sorting in Windows Explorer

Windows XP introduces the concept of "numerical sorting", where filenames in Windows Explorer are sorted by evaluating their numerical value instead of the ASCII order. For example, if you have a bunch of files:
 
  Doc111
  Doc22
  Doc3

they will be sorted as:

  Doc3
  Doc22
  Doc111

because 3 < 2 < 111, get it?

This is very confusing to those of us who expects things to be sorted logically i.e. in ASCII order. Who's the idiot who made this "numerical sort order" default on all Windows after XP?

Anyway, one way to right this wrong is as follows:

1. Press [Win-R], type "gpedit.msc", then press [Enter] to bring up the Local Group Policy Editor.
2. Select "User Configuration", "Administrative Templates", "Windows Components", and finally "Windows Explorer" in the treeview on the left of the editor.
3. Double-click on "Turn off numerical sorting in Windows Explorer" in the "Setting" pane on the right of the editor.
4. Select "Enable",  then click OK to save the changes.

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How to install Windows XP from a USB memory stick

Note to self after having to do this a couple of times. If I need to install WinXP from a USB memory stick, the absolute no-brainer way to do it is WinToFlash. The keyword here is no-brainer, because there are tons of tutorials out there that require you to have a rocket science degree and a PhD to follow. Not so for WinToFlash. Run the program, point the source path to the WinXP install files, point the target path to the USB memory stick and click a button. Then go for a cup of coffee and you are done.

Here is how it looks during bootup:

Option 1 is for the first bootup where you get into the text mode setup, configure and format your partition and copy essential files.

Option 2 is for the second bootup where you actually see the Windows XP splash screen and then it starts to configure devices and settings.

I have no affiliation with the company that produces the software. It has a free, ad-supported version if you are a casual user. There is also a personal, professional and business license if you do this all the time.

Thankfully for Vista and Win7 installation from a USB drive, it is actually quite straightforward and you don't need a PhD for that. You do need to drop to the command prompt for a moment, but that's not as scary as it sounds.

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Dealextreme Aggregator

Just stumbled across this website called GadgetzFinder that aggregates products from a couple of DealExtreme-like sites (including DealExtreme itself). For those of you who are not familiar with DealExtreme, it is the granddaddy of Hong Kong-based B2C websites that list all kinds of Made-in-China gadgets and offer free shipping for all purchases. Almost all the items are a fraction of the price of similar items sold in western developed countries. For example, I bought this laptop security cable recently for under $4, where it would have cost me $20 in local stores.

The downside to that cheap price is the long waiting time for the purchased item to arrive. On average I have to wait about 3 weeks for an item, but surprisingly I have received every single item I have purchased so far, and believe me, I have bought a lot of items from DealExtreme and others. Kudos to the global postal system! Also be prepared for some hits and misses in terms of product quality. But the novelty, convenience and pricing more than offset the occasional misses for me.

Anyway, a site like GadgetzFinder should come in handy in searching for products and comparing prices. I have bought stuff from DealExtreme and FocalPrice, but haven't tried DinoDirect and LighTake yet, so the site should help in product discovery. Plus the RSS feed seems to be quite useful as not all sites (eg. FocalPrice) provide a feed for new products. Note to self: the RSS feed even works for searches, so I can search for eg. "bluetooth stereo headset" and be informed of new products by subscribing to that feed.

Another nice feature is the grouping of similar products that reduces the search space somewhat, though the result is far from perfect and seems to be based on some kind of heuristic matching of the product names. I understand this is a difficult problem, but it would be nice that they can take product description and images into account and produce even more accurate clustering, since there tends to be a lot of similar products even from the same site.

One final notable mention: the website scales down quite nicely to the small screen on my Nexus One. So now I can do all that product research on impulse from my smartphone!

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Export to PDF on Firefox

Looked around for a way to export web pages to PDF on Firefix. Most of the existing addons for exporting to PDF involve doing so via a web service, which has security implications, especially when the web page to be exported contains sensitive information.

The Firefox addon that I finally settled on is PDFIt, which as far as I can tell does not involve any web service but does everything on the client web browser. Once installed, the PDFIt menu appears in the "Tools" menu as well as the context menu.

The PDFIt addon not only lets you convert web pages to PDF, it lets you convert to PNG or JPG as well. In addition, you can add a custom title to the output with full control over the font color, size and position. You can also apply a filter (from a total of 16) to the output, including rotation, flipping, sepia, reflection etc.

The only downside I can find is that the output PDF is an image of the web page i.e. even text on the web page are converted to bitmap. If you need text output in the PDF, then this addon is not for you. However, if text output is not a strict requirement, then PDFIt has a lot to offer.

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