No, not my laptop. See this image:

A pretty serious incident where a Dell laptop exploded due to a Sony battery overheating somewhere in Japan, see the image above. A couple in Tokyo are currently (as of July, 2007) suing both Sony and Apple Japan for over Â¥2 million ($16,700 USD) regarding the incident. On August 14, 2006, Sony and Dell admitted to major flaws in several Sony batteries that could result in the battery overheating and catching fire. As a result they recalled over 4.1 million laptop batteries in the largest computer-related recall to that point in history. The cost of this recall is being shared between Dell and Sony. Dell also confirmed that one of its laptops caught fire in Illinois. This recall also prompted Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry to order the companies to investigate the troubles with the batteries. The ministry said they must report on their findings and draw up a plan to prevent future problems by the end of August, or face a fine under Japan’s consumer safety laws.

Some history in Sony batteries…

On September 19, 2006, Toshiba announced it was recalling 340 000 Sony laptop batteries. This recall, however, is not related to the recalls by Apple and Dell, as the batteries are known to cause the laptops to sometimes run out of power. No injuries or other accidents have been reported, according to Toshiba spokesman Keisuke Omori. On September 23, 2006, Sony announced its investigation of a Lenovo ThinkPad T43 laptop overheated and caught fire in Los Angeles International Airport on September 16, an incident that was confirmed by Lenovo. On September 28, 2006, Lenovo and IBM made the global recall of 526 000 laptop batteries. On September 28, 2006, Sony announced a global battery exchange program in response to growing consumer concerns. On October 2, 2006, Hewlett-Packard (HP) determined that it is not necessary for HP to join the global battery replacement program. On October 3, 2006, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported that Sony was aware of faults in its notebook PC batteries in December 2005 but failed to fully study the problem. On October 16, 2006, Fujitsu announced it was recalling 278,000 Sony laptop batteries. It was also reported that Fujitsu, Toshiba, and Hitachi may seek compensation from Sony over the battery recalls. On April 25, 2007, Acer announced that 27,000 batteries from TravelMate and Aspire series notebooks sold from May 2004 to November 2006 were recalled due to 16 reports of overheating and explosions.

Whoooo! Now I got Ubuntu 7.04 working AFTER the loading screen, only in “Safe graphics mode” though. Same with Freespire but I have to boot from the options screen choosing the “xdriver=vesa” option which obviously means that my computer now only works using VESA drivers. I must say that Ubuntu 7.04 detects my wireless hardware (built in adapter) and can connect to my wireless network which is a nice improvement although it could do this before the interface is much better now. Plus I >really< like Freespire, if I could find a nice way to ‘safely’ partition my hard disk I would install it. Plus I like the one click installation system called CNR, just click the install button next to any of the 34,965 listings and give it about 30 seconds and its in your “Launch” menu (basically the Start menu in Windows, but its in the bottom left corner). Not forgetting that the taskbar (same in Windows) is more customizable and can hide in one click and is avaliable in four different sizes; tiny, small (my favourite), medium and large (about 1 quarter of the screen).

I think that a good beginning to this post would have been ‘Okay’ but I’ve used that too much to begin previous posts, so it all starts like this…

One day I was browsing the internet and came across this www.orangeproblems.co.uk website, because Orange are my ISP. I thought it was quite odd that they were voted worst ISP of 2007, they’re not that bad from my experience. Anyway I found this article of how to set up your printer with a Inventel Livebox (the routers that Orange you get ‘free’ with their wireless and talk packages but as soon as you cancel you’ve got to send them back to Orange – I would have prefered to have used my old NETGEAR router but the Livebox seems to be faster plus it has a phone plug for Orange’s talk service), so I followed this guide and got to the point where it came to select the drivers, and I thought i’m not digging out the printer disk, it’ll take ages and under my computer desk is a right mess; pieces of paper, lots of blank disks that have data on them but not labelled, random disk cases without the disks in them, etc. So I decided to use the nearest driver on the list, since the actual driver I want wasn’t on the list. I wanted a HP PSC 1510 driver but the closes to that was a HP PSC 950 so I just chose that and completed the guide. Then I set up the other machine (the one running Vista) exactly the same and printed a test page. When it started printing, first of all it took about three sheets of paper with it and began. It was about a third through the first page when it stopped and the light kept on flashing, and continued not to do much. Maybe it will continue, but no it didn’t so I checked the “See what’s printing?” screen and nothing was there. I thought a good old unplug would do the job. It did sort of but I’ve still got the problem of it locking up and not doing much.

When I get the time to dig out the printer disk then I’ll hit the “Have disk…” when resetting everything up. So the moral of this story is never choose the closest driver to the one you need if its not there because if you do then something really bad could happen like in my case where I nearly broken my printer and also using ‘Okay’ to begin a post too many times isn’t good so you should start off with something like “I think that a good beginning to this post would have been ‘Okay’ but I’ve used that too much to begin previous posts” when blogging.

Just browsing the internet and I came across…

Yes, Windows Vienna, Microsoft’s new “next generation” operating system. Not much info on it yet though, still newish news. I do know that its estimated that it won’t be avaliable until 2010. Long wait and XP will still probably be better.

I recently found myself downloading a copy of the ReactOS platform. Ofcourse I did download the Live CD but wasn’t able to run it, because this stupid machine decided it didn’t want to after I deleted all of my partitions. I haven’t had chance to try it out on ‘the other machine’ but will do. Don’t think it’ll work because it didn’t in Parallels. It was only 22.[something I can't remember]MB, well it was an ISO but it was all safely zipped up. I thought that it was quite small for a operating system, because Freespire took several hours to download on a somewhat fast connection, but the actual ISO file is little more than a shocking 75MB.

So after all that kerfuffle of the live cd, I just downloaded the QEMU one, which was again very small, obviously because it was all zipped up. I extracted it and ran the “boot.bat” file. I must say how very fast QEMU was at emulating it, it didn’t lag at all and took less than 20 seconds to load up fully. So I started exploring, but soon realised that it was a huge work in progress. The main reason I downloaded was because its claimed that it has the ability to run EXE files. If you don’t know what they are, they’re executables, or programs for short. Those of you may know that I have made some software in the past, namely AMV Studio and AMV Studio Utilites (they’re both different programs) and I wanted to test them on they’re. One problem is that because it was emulating in QEMU that has no options, it automatically chose the wrong network adapter, my internal one for Parallels, not my Local Area or Wireless (but my LAN cable wasn’t plugged in at the time, only Wireless was connected), I couldn’t access the internet. I could hardly find the browser, since it wasn’t in the ‘Internet’ menu, what a minute, there wasn’t even an ‘Internet’ menu. I had to run the ReactOS Explorer program, which when I pressed the ‘Web’ button, prompted me to download some Mozilla ActiveX control thing.

To illustrate some problems I’ve had and what ReactOS is currently capable of doing, I compiled a small gallery with about 6 screenshots. To see it, visit http://www.callumhaywood.com/services/reactos/screenshots/.