J.me

Cleaning MSI GX633 Fan

My current notebook, MSI GX633 turned 2 years old by this March. In past months, the notebook run pretty hot that it’s not even possible to run everything at maximum. A more intense task like video playback would raise the temperature to more than 90 degrees Celcius. I can’t even use the maximum clock (the processor run at 550 Mhz, 1.1 Ghz and 2.2 Ghz), so I’m limiting it to the middle clock, and even so it still heat that much.

I have tried a few solutions to solve this overheating issue, first is undervolting. It’s kind of challenge to find which tools that can undervolt AMD Turion X2 processor, and I found K40Stat worked for me. I was hoping this could solve the overheating, but it’s not. I always get BSOD at the end. The next solution I tried is buying a laptop cooler (opted for Targus model), but it didn’t help much either. In the end, I could only run half the clock of the processor to prevent it from overheat.

In general, overheating is caused by accumulated dust on the air intake and outtake, blocking off the ventilation. Even though the solution is simple, by cleaning the fan and the ventilation, but it require me to open the notebook cover. Since this is my only work computer, I’m always avoiding this but I finally build up the courage to do it as the heat is unbearable anymore. Read on to find out how I clean my fan and solve the overheating issue. 🙂

Virtual Box Crashed in MSI GX633

Well, this has irritated me for a while. Virtual Box keep crashing when it start OS, this happen on any OS I want to run. So I’m unable to run some OS I needed, such as XP and Linux, inside my Seven. This happens for quite a while now, I have tried updating my Virtual Box to the newest version several times, and none of them have worked.

Today, I tried again running Virtual Box, hoping it will be able to run a small OS like Puppy. The same thing happen, it crashed. I was forced to turn off the machine manually. After that, I did a little Google search. Finally I found that this problem also happen on another AMD Turion powered notebook, and not only on Virtual Box, but also on Virtual PC.

I found that it seems updating the BIOS might solve this issues. That raise my hopes up. But unfortunately, search in MSI website returned that I have the latest BIOS version. So no update is available, thus no solution. Good things that now I know the problem is related to the processor, further search found that hardware virtualization is the culprit.

Now that I have hardware virtualization disabled, I can finally run any OS I needed. To disable it, go to setting on each OS, click on System and move to Acceleration tab. Uncheck the Enable VT-x/AMD-V option.

Reference:

Thanks Google!

Google sorry

Well, this is a little unusual. I got two times of Google sorry today, while I actually never got one before. This happened when I’m trying to search a query in Chrome address field. Weird… It might be my network though.

And of course, I don’t have any bot program to run search repeatly. And I also didn’t do any ping to their server. Is that means Google have increased their security for overuse of their search engine? Well, whatever. I just hope that it won’t happen again. 🙂

Mouse gesture to emulate stylus scrolling on Firefox

gesture+bamboo

One of the feature I missed while migrating to Ubuntu Linux is the fully functional Wacom tablet. Good things is with Ubuntu 9.04, it has pre-installed Wacom driver, so it works out of the box for my Wacom Bamboo. However, not all features we have on Windows (and Mac) are available on Linux, the only one I missed is the stylus scrolling (by default, in Windows, when we hold the stylus button and drag, the scroll event occur). Since I do browsing all the time, sometime it is hard to allocate the scrollbar, especially in a looong page, that is painful. Up until now, I use the keyboard to scrolling that looong page but it is not efficient, and finally I found the solution by using Mouse Gesture add-ons on Firefox to emulate it. 🙂 I love Chrome better though, but the only solution I found is with Firefox.

So this is how I do it. First install the add-ons called Mouse Gestures Redox on Firefox. Next we setting it up.

Installing Aptana Studio on Ubuntu 9.04

aptana

Aptana Studio is a powerful IDE for web development. It supports HTML, CSS, Javascript and the server side script such as PHP, Ruby and Python. Even more, it support a wide variety of Javascript library. It based on Eclipse and available as a standalone application or as a plugin for Eclipse. Aptana Studio is available on Windows, Mac and Linux. And the best of all is, Aptana Studio is free. Here I will post how I install the recent version of standalone Aptana Studio, 1.5, on 32 bit Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope.

First of all, download the Aptana Studio on http://www.aptana.org, choose the Linux and 32 bit version, or change it accordingly to suit your machine. Before we start installing the Aptana Studio, we need to ensure we have installed the sun-java6-jre and sun-java6-plugin. To do that, simply type this in terminal

Wacom Bamboo and Inkscape issue

I recently tried to use Inkscape for drawing some vector based graphics, unfortunately my Wacom Bamboo didn’t work as expected. Whenever I move my pen up and back to the Inkscape window, the cursor stuck. To solve it, I need to move my pen to the area outside Inkscape window, then it works again. Really, not comfortable.

Then again, Google helps me to find the answer. 🙂 This bug has been reported and some workaround has been made. Simply by modifying a DLL will make it works fine. However, I’m not gonna get into this thing, thanks to the ready DLL by Voon, it makes our life easier…