Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion

gateway ta6 laptop

<< < (3/14) > >>

Shades:
That is Microsoft's virtual keyboard to help you log in to your system. This keyboard is helpful when you only have your stylus to type in your password. Looks to me like your keyboard isn't detected (fast enough) and that Windows XP is helping you out by activating its virtual keyboard instead.

I don't think your computer has the option in BIOS, but you could try to see in there if there is an option for the BIOS to wait until all USB devices have registered themselves with the BIOS before it continues booting your computer. There will be an option to select if you want to do a slow boot. That could give the keyboard also enough time to register itself properly. By doing this, Windows XP shouldn't show the virtual keyboard anymore to help you log into your Windows account.

Once you logged into Windows, check if you can change this behavior by checking the options of virtual keyboard and the Windows boot routine. The 'Control Panel' should get you access to both.

holt:
i think i'll leave the virtual keyboard alone, and thank you for the information. did i mention this laptop was a freebie and came with no manual or advice. this morning, the front glass screen fell out onto the keyboard. it was almost comical although i was horrified. i put it back into place and pressed it down into a black sticky border. it left a few tiny black streaks under glass along the bottom edge of the screen, which i decided not to try to remedy. to force it loose again using a flat edge paint scraper could crack the glass. i'm thinking either to let it fall out again someday, and then clean the streaks, and tape it down next time...or...a repeat could add more streaks. some sticky black residue was around the outside, and nothing would touch it but acetone on tissue paper. it's all cleaned up except for the very faint and tiny streaks under glass at the extreme bottom edge of the screen. might be best to tape it all down to avoid a worse predicament. it has been quite a learning experience.

in spite of this, i think laptops are not so bad. if i ever get a newer one, i'll just try to avoid a 'tablet' design.

holt:
The top/outer layer of screen glass started to fall out of the frame again, just from being on for three hours from the heat of normal operation, and I would appreciate a few suggestions please.

holt:
I would like to run a backup/clone copy of the laptop's hd somehow, but I'm unfamiliar. Do you use a toaster-style device to drop both the laptop hd and the cloning hd into? Or do they make a master/slave IDE kind of hd ribbon cable to plug into where the laptop's hd goes, so you can just plug in two HDs? But the laptop hd uses a different plug shape (for a 10 year old Gateway TA6, while the cloning hd would be IDE. Or what would someone suggest? If I have to use a USB port and take all night, I can do that too.

That's a thought; can I just get a USB adapter to plug into the external HD, and then where would the HD power jack get its power from?

I replaced the malfunctioning DVD+RW player/burner with an identical used like-new unit so it works now; it is older and slower technology, and took 40 minutes to transfer 3 gb of files from a DVD disk to the HD, but it's better than nothing. Replacing the unit was easy, except for the snap-on plastic external bezel, which took 2 hours of nerve-wracking work with a pile of little bitsy screws and tools and a magnifying light to get the bezel off the old unit without breaking its three concealed delicate little plastic fish hook prongs, but I finally succeeded.

I'm making good progress resurrecting this old laptop and appreciate everyone's help very much.

Shades:
Cloning in itself isn't hard to do, there are many pieces of software that can do this (free and commercial) and if you take the time to properly identify which hard disk is which (including reading any message that software presents to you), there isn't much that can go wrong. However, if you do this wrong, you are in real trouble...that is, if you mind losing your data.

Finding someone that still has a mainboard with IDE ports that work will be harder. If you are sure the laptop uses IDE, you can even use the laptop itself, but you might need to take it apart to connect both the master-slave drives. And keep it like that for as long as the cloning procedure will take. If you do find someone with such a mainboard, you might still have a problem. Connecting both drives to the same hard disk controller will reduce the time to do the cloning considerably, so that would be the preferred option.

Connecting an IDE HD from a laptop onto the IDE hard disk controller of a desktop PC, might require you to alter the IDE cable. Had to do this on occasion when connecting laptop HD's to the IDE port of the Amiga home computer. Don't assume blindly that the IDE cable for a desktop PC is immediately usable in a laptop. Some lines in a standard IDE cable are meant to transfer power and it is not a given that those lines are in the same spot. Often I had to remove one of the IDE connectors find the cables for power, loosen them from the rest of the cable, twist that part of the cable and use a connector from the laptop IDE cable to be able to use the laptop HD in a desktop.

It is easier (and neater) to take the hit in cloning speed and use an external USB device to do the cloning. If all you want to do is making a backup, than don't do cloning. There is much more backup software available that is much simpler in use and faster too. Anyway, when you have a computer, it really is a good idea to invest in a portable hard disk to make backups on. Reliable and simple, what is not to like? 

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page