Important Note on Laptop or Notebook Computers: - Laptop computers that require the lower case to be disassembled are subject to a $7495 minimum charge even if no repairs are performed. A laptop's lower case is only opened for hardware repairs. Some laptop or notebook repairs that require the lower case to be opened can take up to 3 hours. Why you ask? Fortunately for the consumer, computers get smaller every day. Unfortunately for repair shops, performing a common task such as replacing the motherboard can easily take 7 times that of a desktop system in labor time. Much time working on a laptop is spent under a magnifying glass or twisting a screwdriver on an endless numbers of screws. This fact is something that you may want to consider when buying your next computer. Do you really need a laptop or will a desktop system really do? Desktop systems are more affordable to repair. The labor investment is significantly less. Replacement parts are more common and affordable. Unfortunately you just can't carry desktop machines around.
I've taken apart laptops. It certainly does not take me 3 hours to open it up because if it did, I would have given up much sooner!!!Thursday, February 14, 2008
Friday, February 8, 2008
Norton & other security kooks (and you think i'm nuts)
Give your overzealous security software the boot
About five years ago I installed the family version of Symantec's Norton Internet Security software on one of my PCs, rendering the machine unusable. Not only couldn't I get any access to the Internet, it was impossible to uninstall the program. I ended up having to reinstall the operating system and all my applications--except Norton Internet Security. At the time I said I would never again install a Symantec security program on any PC, but about a year ago I bought a PC that came with 90 days of Norton 360, and the program won me over. When the free trial period was over I even coughed up $80 for a year's subscription. Apart from the frequent nags about my need to back up (I prefer to use my own manual backup strategy), I'm happy with the Norton 360.
Now the other side of the coin: I've used CheckPoint's ZoneAlarm firewall--both the free and pro versions--for many years, and on many different PCs. The program would occasionally prevent a legitimate program from performing some operation, but on those rare instances I merely shut the firewall down long enough to complete the task, and then turned it back on. No problem.
Until this morning, that is. I spent four hours trying to update a Web site via ftp, only to be told that access to my ISP's ftp server was denied. I tried using the WS_FTP Pro ftp program, Windows Explorer, Firefox, and even a WYSIWYG Web editor, but nothing could get through to the server. I could access the remote system on another PC on my network, but I wanted to avoid having to move the files in question to that PC to complete the transfer. Just last week I had ftp'ed some files without a problem.
After several calls to my blameless ISP, a tech suggested that I uninstall ZoneAlarm. Not just shut it down (which I had already tried), but completely uninstall the app. This struck me as somewhat extreme, but after spending so much time trying to figure out the glitch, I thought it was worth a try. And what do you know: as soon as ZoneAlarm was off the system, I could access the ftp server without a hitch.