Tech on Tour » dansnell

How to reset a Sony Ericsson

dansnell — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 11:22:52 +0000

My Sony Ericsson K660i crashed on me the other day. For some reason it was freezing on start up. Due to this it also meant I was unable to get through the menu to the Master Reset. Unfortunately there is also no key combination or hidden button that might perform this task. This seemed like the only option to resurrect my phone. So I was a bit stuck in how to get it working again. After a phone call to Sony Ericsson I was presented with an option. By connecting the phone to a PC and running the Update Service (it can be found in the support section of Sony Ericssons web-site) I was able to reinstall the software. Even though there was no actual update for my phone I was able to reinstall the current phone settings. The major downside to this is everything gets wiped so all contacts, apps, images stored on the phone are removed. So make sure you keep a backup of these things in case of a crash like this. I would imagine this will also work with other Sony Ericsson phones where you are unable to get to the menu.

Installing OS X without a functioning optical drive

dansnell — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 22:05:02 +0000

I recently gave my old powerbook to my sister in law. I had a lot of information on it and so I planned to transfer all my files and do a clean install. One problem the dvd drive on my old powerbook is broken. It would continually spit the installation disk out. Fortunately I have another mac which was able to help with this.

So how do I install OS X when the dvd drive is broken?

1. Connect the two Macs by firewire cable. One will be the host for the DVD drive and one will be the target which you will install OS X onto.

2. Start up the target computer you plan to install OS X on in target mode by holding down T when you restart the computer. This will mount the target computer as a hard drive on the host computer.

3. Put the OS X installation disk into the Mac that is your host computer.

4. You can now either open the installer on the DVD which will prompt you to restart the host computer. Or you can simply restart and hold down C which will force the Mac to startup from the DVD.

5. Once you have started up from the installer DVD follow through the normal steps. You will then arrive at the option to choose the destination. Select the hard drive of the target computer. You will probably have to change the options if you are not doing an upgrade.

6. Once you have finished the installation shut down the host computer and disconnect the firewire cable. You can now restart the target computer which will startup with a newly installed OS X.

*Note: If you are installing OS X 10.3 (panther) or earlier you can not use an intel based mac to use as the host computer. Both the target and host computers will need to be powerpc based and vice versa if you are installing on an intel based mac.

iMac start up issue

dansnell — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 11:52:44 +0000

This morning we had a problem starting our Intel iMac. It was turning on but all that was happening was the white power light on the front was lit up. I tried the usual things like
unplugging all the peripherals – nope
unplugging everything and waiting 15 minutes and plugging the power, keyboard and mouse back in and trying – again nothing.

After a bit of searching around I found a possible solution which I found worked. Basically it was to unplug everything, remove the ram wait a few seconds. Put back together and hey presto it was up and running again.

Tell Window’s “No to all”

dansnell — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 18:40:23 +0000

It’s always been a help to be able to click yes to all when copying files in Windows XP. But what if you want to say No to all. For most of us we just have to click No repeatedly. Quite an annoyance if there are a lot of files. However there is a way around this. Windows XP has a little hidden trick up it’s sleeve. By holding down the Shift key and click No you are saying No to all.

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