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Posts in 'Hardware'

RSS Feed for OCZ Vertex 3 SSD firmware updates

Here’s a quick and dirty solution to me not being able to keep updated with OCZ firmware updates for my Vertex 3 SSD.  For whatever reason, OCZ doesn’t provide a news feed of firmware updates (that I know of, correct me if I’m wrong!) so I’ve sorted a screen scraping Yahoo Pipes pipe to do it for me:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=a1f15d7ead0122567ad6537b2de484a3&_render=rss

This RSS feed will (or should) only ever feature just 1 item - the latest version information for the firmware.  So, it won’t handle keeping track of …

in Hardware · Thu 20 October 2011

Dell SK-8135 keyboard not working during boot (POST, BIOS, GRUB) on OptiPlex 990

Note

Update: Since this was written, Dell has released version A10 of their OptiPlex 990 BIOS!  I’ve tested this on my 990 and my keyboard now works!

Just a quick note to anyone out there confused out of their mind if their Dell keyboard isn’t working with their computer during boot: there is some incompatibility between the OptiPlex 990 and the Dell SK-8135 keyboard.  I’m using the A06 BIOS, which is latest at the time of writing.

The result of this is that you cannot use the keyboard during boot, so not within POST, not to …

in Hardware · Thu 20 October 2011

How to: Updating OCZ Vertex 3 SSD Firmware (on a Dell M1530 laptop)

Note

Update 3: This guide is effectively now entirely outdated with regards to the available tools. I’ve gone back to simply using a Windows boot disk to handle the firmware upgrades, although they’ve gotten less frequent as of late.

I’ve just shelled out a good chunk of money in buying an OCZ Vertex 3 240GB solid state drive (SSD) and it’s amazingly quick. So amazingly quick that I thought I may just have fallen into a coma when I had to temporarily switch back to my old mechanical hard drive and boot from it again. And …

in Hardware · Sat 21 May 2011

DIY - Replace your Logitech Premium Notebook Headset foam ear pads

So, I’m the proud owner of a set of a Logitech Premium Notebook Headset. I purchased these headphones a fair while ago - around 2 years - and just like any set of headphones, the foam ear pads deteriorated away when I took them out to use them after a long spell in storage. Usually, this wouldn’t be a problem if it were a set of headphones that used a standard shaped ear pad — just buy some replacement foam pages and put them on. These headphones aren’t so, with the shape being more like a D shape rather than …

in Hardware · Sat 04 December 2010