Computers and Technology

On Wednesday I attended the NTC Scholarship ceremony in Phayathai, where Jirawat Thaenthong received funding for the remainder of his studies. I am Jirawat's advisor for his PhD studies on mobile networking. The National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) is the telecommunications regulator in Thailand, and in the past year set up the Telecommunications Research and Industrial Developmenent Institute (TRIDI) to fund research in the field. One of the first areas of funding was scholarships. Jirawat was one of the 22 recipients (7 PhD, 15 Masters) from across Thailand. Well done, Jirawat!

Wow, that was close! I decided to delete an old fat32 partition that I used to share data between linux (first Fedora, now Ubuntu) and Windows on my dual boot PC. Since Ubuntu supports NTFS partitions, I hardly ever used it. I used Partition Manager Professional in Windows to delete the partition. No worries.

However, I also decided to resize my /boot partition under Ubuntu. When I recently upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04, the process was stalled several times because I didn't have enough space on the /boot partition (initially 100Mb). This was very annoying because I had to move some files from /boot and restart the entire Ubuntu upgrade (several minutes wasted each time). So I used Partition Manager to also increase the /boot partition to 200MB. No worries.

After buying a new Video Card for my PC, I still had some serious problems. When starting my computer, fans, the CPU, hard drive and other devices seemed to start, but nothing was displayed on the monitor. This was similar to what triggered me to buy a new video card - maybe I wasted 3000 Baht!

Over the past couple of weeks I had a very crude fix to this problem: when booting, it seemed if I continually pressed Escape (maybe also other keys), the computer would start, that is POST would complete and the operating system start. However this didn't always work. It seemed every day I had to try 5 or 6 times to get the computer to boot. Not good!

Today I tried a bit harder to fix the problem. After checking all the cables and connections, and checking a bit on the web, I think I narrowed it down to two possible problems:

1. The internal battery and/or CMOS RAM were faulty (I had noticed about 1 week ago that the system time was incorrect one day). I followed the ASUS motherboard instructions of resetting the RAM. Unplug the power from the PC; remove the battery; change the jumper from default to RESET for 10 seconds; change back to default; put the battery back in; and start the computer.
2. One of the RAM DIMM slots was faulty. At the same time as doing the internal battery check, I also removed a new stick of 1GB RAM that I bought at the same time as the video card.

Restarted after these two changes and the computer booted immediately, without any input from the keyboard. This looked good. I put the second 1GB stick of RAM back in and the old problems occurred (this points to the RAM/DIMM being the problem, not the battery/CMOS - but my gut feeling says it was wise to reset the CMOS as well). So then after trying the second (new) 1GB of RAM by itself in the first slot (this worked), and concluded the second slot may be faulty. Now I have both 1GB sticks in the two second (black) DIMM slots, rather than the two first (yellow) DIMM slots. Everything seems to be working ok, but lets wait and see after a few days...

Lets hope this is the last of my computer problems for a few months.

Before coming to Thailand, some people told me that things (clothes, electronics, minds) would not survive the conditions well here, compared to Australia. Well, that is starting to show, especially for electronics. Since arriving, some of the things that have failed:

Video Camera. Within the first month of being here, my Canon MV730i digital video camera stopped working. Since I haven't had much use for it (instead preferring the still camera), it has sat in the bottom of my cupboard gathering dust. I have a strong belief that, in the same way in stopped working for no apparent reason, it will magically fix itself one day if I leave it alone.

Digital Camera. In August 2007 towards the end of Mum and Dads visit, my Canon IXUS 50 digital still camera shat itself. More specifically, the automatic lens would not extend/retract correctly. Well, this was very upsetting, being about 2 years old and in general quite a useful camera (although the quality of pictures, especially without good lighting, is not so good). So I went to the Canon support centre at Zeer Rangsit and

Linux distribution which is relatively easy to install and use. I have tried Ubuntu and it does provide a user friendly Linux distro, detecting hardware automatically so that things like sound and networking work straight away.

Background

Zeer Rangsit is an IT mall in Pathumthani, about 10 minutes north of the old Don Muang Airport (and 30 minutes south of Thammasat University).

Association of Computing Machinery. US-based professional organisation for computing researchers and professionals.

Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers

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