Anyway, to make a long story short I “gifted” my RAZR to someone I knew to replace a Samsung E317. This person liked the RAZR and soon after started getting the ringtones they could never download with their old E317. Now after years of excellent service in my hands, soon after, the screen on this thing was toast. Let’s just say you shouldn’t clamshell these babies over your beltloop and expect it to last when it gets booty bumped by a rather hefty ass.

I thought it was a goner. I mean look at it – that’s a neat fractal pattern there on the screen but its otherwise fairly useless without the big screen. You could dial if you knew what you were doing (and indeed the phone did otherwise work). I asked a friend if he could find someone to fix or sell it and he confirmed my supposition that it might just be more than it’s worth. Case closed, right?  Nope!

One night browsing through eBay for a new laptop AC adapter, I decided to search for Motorola RAZR replacement LCD screens. Lo and behold, I found MANY of them and they were MUCH more affordable than I would have imagined. I ended up paying $19.95 for the screen and an ungodly $15.00 to ship the little bastard. I guess that’s another thing eBay is good for: shipping extortion.

I got the screen a few days later and set about looking for instructions on how to replace it. The seller stiffed me the instructions I requested, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me. I found some information on removing the faceplate but that was just the beginning as you’ll see below.

Replacing the Screen

First things first, you’ll need some tools. I used T5/T6 torx tool (included with the replacement screen), the smallest in a set of jewelers flat blade screw drivers, and a shaved down popsicle stick to do the job (I used sandpaper to shave down one end as thin as possible). I’ve seen plastic “shims” and neat tweezers but I had to resort to improvising as I don’t have either. You might want some glue to keep the parts joined as well. I didn’t have any so I just put everything back together hoping the remnants of factory glue would hold well enough.

So the first step is to remove the battery from the phone. We don’t want any fireworks nor do we want to damage any of the sensitive electrical components inside the unit. With that done we can start having some fun.

Next, flip open the phone and remove the rubber pieces covering the screws that hold the screen assembly together. My phone was already missing one and I ended up losing another in my haste to put things back together.

Take the T5/T6 Torx tool you hopefully got with your replacement LCD and remove the four screws that were previously covered. This shouldn’t require too much effort and you will want to be careful not to strip these out in the process.

Now you will need to unclip the outer housing from the unit. This can be tricky and requires a bit of careful work and some patience. There are six clips holding this piece onto the phone, indicated below. Start at the top of the phone by inserting you small flat blade into the seam on each side of the camera lense. Red clips first, then yellow followed by green.

The next two clips are a bit more difficult, and I had some trouble disengaging them as they clip in toward the screen. I found that if you lift from the top and wiggle the housing a little the clips will let go with a bit of pulling, but not too hard now! The final two clips let go with relative ease when you lift the casing up and away from the phone. Note that the silver buttons will likely fall out as they are sitting in the case with nothing but the housing holding them in.

With your shaved down popsicle stick (or plastic tool as it may be) you’ll begin the process of prying off the “lense”. This piece and the circuit board are glued to the LCD screen with some rather sticky factory glue. I went around the lense 3 or 4 times, pushing in further each time to separate the lense from the circuit board and LCD screen. As you can see here there is a white film left on each after the process is complete. Again take care and be patient, if you crack the lense it’s back to eBay for more replacement parts.

You can now disengage the silver and black connector using your mini flat blade screwdriver and apply light pressure as you lift up from between the LCD screen and away from the phone. It should pop up. The other two small ribbon connectors can be removed from their white and brown sockets by inserting the flat blade screw driver in between the ribbon and the brown lever and again applying light pressure up and away from the LCD screen (these brown pieces fold out, away from the phone). You can see above I’ve disconnected the larger connectors and left the smaller one connected.

To prepare for the circuit layer removal, use your flat blade screwdriver and carefully loosen the parts of the circuit layer used for the buttons. I inserted the blade between the housing and the board and carefully pried each of the three areas away from the phone.

Get your shaved popsicle stick or plastic tool back out. Using the same action used to remove the lense, insert the tool between the LCD assembly and the printed circuit “layer” (it’s not really a board) and carefully sever the circuit from the assembly. This piece is glued using the same type of glue used to secure the lense. Be especially careful as you near the connector for the circuit board if you left it connected in the earlier step. When you have completely separated the circuit layer from the LCD unit, you can disconnect the last remaining connector if you haven’t already. You should now be able to lift the entire circuit layer away from the LCD unit.

With that fun out of the way, you can now pry the LCD screen assembly out of the housing. I used the flat blade to lift the unit up and away from the housing and then slid the entire piece out, away from the ear piece (towards the camera assembly). Here it is, the broken little LCD screen that could. Pay attention to the way this little bugger sat in the housing, obviously the new one will need to be placed with the same orientation.

Break out that fancy new (and working) LCD screen that’s been screaming at you since you got it. You may not have noticed but you likely find a thin protective plastic film on the large and small screens. Remove this and do so very carefully so you don’t scratch the beautiful new screens. I almost forgot to do this myself and am glad I remembered before I connected everything back up.

With any luck you’ll place the new LCD correctly and the connectors will match up. Re-attach the circuit layer back into the smaller white and brown connector in the screen. Remember that the brown part of the connector swings away from the LCD screen unit to allow for re-attachment of the connector. When seated simply snap it back in place by pressing it down.

With your fingers, and the flat blade screwdriver (maybe even with your fancy shaved popsicle stick or plastic tool) , re-attach the layer to the LCD screen. With any luck it will have retained some of its sticky features. After that I used the flat blade to carefully lay the button circuits back in place and re-attach them to the housing, making sure they were placed correctly in the notched areas. Now reconnect the larger silver connector and the other ribbon cable for the camera.

Take the lense and seat it over the small LCD screen by using the clear area in the center as your guide. I approximated the placement and made some minor adjustments when replacing the housing to make it sit right. Replace the buttons in their sockets, taking care to place them correctly. The large button with the indentation in the middle and the small button should be placed on the same side as each other, with the final button going back into its home on the other side. You’ll also want to ensure they are placed in their respective slots correctly, with the flattest portion of the button “template” facing the larger LCD screen (the other side of the button’s squared bottom area is more rounded if you look closely). If everything went well you’ll see something like this.

Now take the outer housing you removed and lay it in starting with the end opposite the camera. Now’s the time to reposition the lense if it doesn’t look like it’s sitting right. With a simple press and a couple light snaps the outer housing should now be re-attached. Get your T5/T6 torx tool out and screw the housing back together. You can then replace the rubber pieces (smaller ones towards the keypad).

Replace your battery and/or plugin your charger and turn on the phone. If you see something like the image below, congratulations – you’re now an expert at Motorola RAZR LCD screen repair!

Manufacturers are cramming more and more space into the bite sized 2.5″ space used for hard drives in today’s laptops. While the growth in capacity hasn’t necessarily matched that of the desktop hard drive, it’s not unusual to see 100+ GB hard drives installed in laptops these days. Over the past few years, these little hulks of space have become much more affordable. I saw an ad for Best Buy today quoting an 80GB laptop hard drive at $90 and of course better deals can be had at sites like NewEgg (Western Digital 80GB @ $65 with $5 shipping) and ZipZoomFly (Hitachi Travelstar 100GB @ $79 with free shipping).

One of my co-workers recently bit the bullet and bought a 120GB Seagate hard drive for her Toshiba laptop and asked me if I could perform the upgrade. Of course, being the gentleman I am I agreed to do it (in exchange for a VHS VCR of hers so I could record the old VHS tapes I have to DVD-R). So I brought the laptop home this weekend and took some photos of the process so I could post them here to prove the upgrade process really is pretty simple.

Decisions – Want to keep your existing files or start fresh?

Before you begin, you’ll need to decide if you want a nice fresh installation of Windows XP (Home, Media Center Edition or Pro) and based on that decision, you can jump right in to removing your old hard drive, installing the new drive and re-installing your OS and applications. If you want to keep your existing OS installation you’ll need a few extra tools.

For preserving the existing OS and data, you’ll need to invest in drive imaging software such as Symantec’s Ghost ($69.99) or Acronis’ True Image ($49.99). Your drive may also come with free utilities like Western Digital’s Data LifeGuard Tools or Maxtor’s MaxBlast software. I also recently heard of a free utility called DriveImage XML. Any of these tools should be sufficient to get your data copied, and even in the worst case you still have your old drive as a backup in case anything goes wrong during the copy.

You’ll probably also want to have a desktop computer handy with enough free space to store a drive image, and an adapter to connect your desktop system to the smaller laptop drive connections. I picked up a 2.5″ laptop drive adapter kit from CompUSA for about $10, which includes the adapter and mounting rails. The adapters are extremely easy to use and require no additional software to install.

Get to the upgrade already!

Without further ado, let’s dig into the process of removing and upgrading your hard drive.

Step 1 – Locate the hard drive bay on your laptop

Depending on who made your laptop, you’re likely to find a removable panel on the bottom of your unit or a removable bay on the side of the unit. For this demonstration I used my co-worker’s Toshiba laptop and the drive bay is accessible from the bottom of the unit. Many Dell and perhaps other laptops hold the drive in a removable bay on the side of the unit with two screws used to secure the bay from the bottom. As you can see the Toshiba has a single screw holding the panel on.

Step 2 – Remove the hard drive and tray

Locate the screws holding the panel or bay and remove them. After this is done you can should be able to easily remove the panel or bay using your fingers and a little lifting and/or pulling movement. I used a small flat-blade screw driver to pry up the access panel on the Toshiba. On Dell laptops, you can just pull the drive tray away from the unit to remove it. With the drive tray in the Toshiba, get ahold of the unit where it connects to the laptop (towards the rear) and pull towards the front of the laptop to disconnect the drive from the system.

At this point you can skip to Step 7 if you are just replacing the drive and plan to re-install your OS and applications on a clean drive.

Step 3 – Create a disk image of your old drive

This is likely the most complex part of the process. With the drive removed, open up your laptop adapter kit and remove the adapter from the package. Install the adapter onto the drive, using the pins as your guide. As you can see in the photo below, one pin is missing from the two rows of pins on the drive, and the adapter will also have not slot for a pin in the same location. Use care when installing the adapter, as bent pins can spell certain doom for your old notebook hard drive.

Step 4 – Connect the drive to your handy dandy desktop computer

With the adapter installed, it’s time to break open your desktop computer. If you already have a drive and CD-ROM or multiples of each installed, it’s quite likely you will need to “borrow” a cable from your CD-ROM in order to plug the laptop drive into the system. If you have a free IDE/ATA port (usually black, 40-pin connector on the motherboard) you can use a spare IDE/ATA cable leftover from a desktop drive replacement or you can buy one for $10 or so at your favorite computer shop. If you plan to borrow an existing cable be sure it’s not already attached to the system’s boot drive, otherwise you will have problems booting the desktop into the OS installed on it. Also be sure your imaging software is installed prior to disconnecting your CD-ROM drive.

Plug one end of the cable into the laptop drive adapter, and plug the other end into the motherboard in the available slot. Take an available 4-pin power connector (Red, Yellow and two black wires) and it into the 4-pin socket that came with the adapter. Now boot up your desktop system.

Step 5 – Image the old drive

Imaging your drive is relatively easy using the software mentioned above. I used Ghost to create an image of the laptop drive and stored it on my desktop system for use later. Just remember where you put the image. This process takes anywhere from 5-30 minutes depending on the size and speed of the old drive and your desktop system. When the process is complete, you can shutdown the computer and remove the adapter from the old laptop drive. Keep everything else connected.

Step 6 – Image the new drive

With imaging of your old drive complete you can safely set the old drive aside. Plug the new drive into the laptop adapter and restart your desktop machine. Startup your imaging software and reverse the process you used to image the old drive. You want to copy the data from the image to the new drive. This step will hopefully be faster than the previous step, because you got a faster drive (right?) however expect it to take a similar amount of time.

When the process completes, disconnect the drive from the adapter and remove the spare IDE/ATA cable from your computer (or re-connect it to the drives it was previously connected to). You can button up your desktop computer at this point.

Step 7 – Remove the old drive from the tray assembly and attach the tray to the new drive

In the next shot you’ll see the screws you need to remove in order to separate the drive from the tray. The Toshiba had four screws installed to hold the drive in the tray. Remove the screws and detach the drive from the tray, paying attention to the orientation of the drive and the pins as you do so. If the drive is covered with any anti-static or other “wrapping” remove that as well. You can reuse the shielding on your new drive if desired (as long as it doesn’t completely cover any “breather holes” marked on the new drive). Using the screws you removed, attach the new drive to the tray in the same orientation as the old drive.

Step 8 – Reinstall the new drive and tray in your laptop and button ‘er up!

Slide the tray back into your laptop being careful to ensure it slides back in smoothly. In the Toshiba I had to insert the tab first towards the front of the system, lay down the drive, then push back towards the rear of the unit to reconnect. With the drive appropriately positioned, replace the panel you removed and/or screw the assembly back together.

Startup the laptop, and if you did everything correctly your OS will startup. When the boot is complete, checkout your massive hard drive and its gobs of free space.

Congratulations – you just upgraded your laptop!

It’s a shame really. The net is chock full of information that actually is useful. I should know as I’m an avid (ab)user of the informational component of the Internet. I probably google at least a dozen times a day for things I’m interested in, from mindless browsing to things that make my life (and job) easier. Through all the browsing and hunting I’ve come to realize that the one thing I might be able to do here is to put useful information at not only my fingertips, but within reach of others as well.

You see, over the past year I’ve worked for hire on many different projects, from contract software development to mediocre attempts to help companies improve their site visibility through search engines. I’ve fixed numerous computer hardware and software problems, and helped many friends, family and other acquiantances fulfill their computational desires through better computing. I’m certainly no computer god, but it’s something I actually do well from what I hear.

In that time I’ve spent countless hours, nay days wading through sites full of junk just to get what I want: an answer. Things such as, why does my ATI Radeon X800XL display “No Signal” when I try to use the VIVO feature to watch TV through a cablebox? Or, how do I convert text output in VB6 from ANSI/ASCII character sets (UTF-16?) to UTF-8 so I can preserve non-English characters during file export? It hit me during my last adventure to figure out which motherboard is likely the best bet for an Intel Core 2 Duo: wouldn’t it be great if I could find this info somewhere that makes it simple and easy to get the answers? I mean the real answer, not just a bunch of conjecture and supposition.

So here I am with bandwidth so plentiful that I hardly scratch the surface of it, and I’m basically letting my site sit here and waste away. Why don’t I just start putting all that great info I find here in one spot so I can point friends, family and other technically afflicted folks to it for quick and simple answers? That MIGHT make this thing more useful! You think?

While this may be a great intention, I will attempt to hold true to my desire to make this place useful. In the coming days and weeks I’m sure to find a great many more solutions to problems I run into all the time, and hopefully the answers will be here for you when you need them. While I am a software engineer by trade, I have been asked by many, from all walks of life, to answer questions on firewalls, networks, remote desktop, VPNs, servers, wireless networks, web sites, web advertising, search engine optimization, software development, coding, debugging, troubleshooting, computer upgrades, etc. The list goes on and on. And the one thing that helps anyone in those situations is this, the great Internet. Blogs, forums, search engines, development sites, you name it. If someone has tried it before you’ll likely find that person has posted something somewhere on the topic at hand. At least, we all hope so.

Here’s to giving back to the great network that so capably has taken care of me and just about every question I’ve ever come up with. I hope you find some of those answers here as I work to get something useful and interesting posted on my site.

Thanks for sticking around to read all that.

read more | digg story

Far more useful than an attitude review for IT people – this post actually contains some useful information! What a novel concept.

read more | digg story

Technologist Manifesto…, or Things Everyone in IT Should Know

I’ve considered ways to make the concept viable as a business and have come up with few ideas on that topic. The best I think I have mulled out is taking the concept and applying a Google spin to it. Create a categorization technique to label each submitted pixel/link, combine them into a single banner or thumbnail and contextually place them on publisher sites. Charge a nominal setup fee ($5) and then start the bidding wars for not only internal banner pixel placement, but for targeted sites and keywords. You could use the home page to display the pixels ala MDHP, and also allow bidding on the page.

I’m sort of disappointed in the lack of tech prowess the MDHP page shows, but nevertheless it was obviously not intended to be cutting edge in that sense so I considered how to technically make a pixel ad page work better and this naturally goes towards Web 2.0 tendencies. A Web 2.0 approach here would be to use AJAX/RSS techniques to load up the categorized or home page targeted ads via XmlHttpRequest, parsing each and positioning each dynamically. Then you can automate the process for each visit and check for updates to the ad list/images, applying them to the home page as necessary and dynamically. Then the page loads up without images and starts populating after the response with the ad list is received. The RSS feed itself could be used to syndicate the ad feed as well.

Sounds almost useful to me – and might actually be a viable business. Maybe it even exists already. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if someone out there has already considered these things and taken care of them. If not, cut me in on the deal, eh?

The fact of the matter remains that while I apply myself to solving each of these problems it will inevitably lead to another list of reasons why I’m STILL not a millionaire. In reality, it seems the attainment of millionaire status is often the result of luck (and maybe a mind to sieze opportunity the moment it arrives).

Don’t get me wrong, it hasn’t been tough for me to make a living – I’ve been in the technology field for almost 10 years now and haven’t had much trouble sustaining employment. What has been difficult is finding the balance between the job and the family (of six) that I long to be a part of – the past 8 months I have been working in excess of 80 hours a week. Hence my journey for financial freedom and this self perspective into what I think are probably the top reasons why I haven’t made it into the ranks of the financially enlightened (luck aside).

1. I read too much and don’t apply enough of what I read.
   This one is pretty simple. I read like no other. My latest favorite Internet reading addiction is digg.com. I’ve wasted lots of time on that one, but the solution is simple. Stop reading. Start doing. ‘Nuff said.
2. When I work on a project, it’s difficult to stay focused on it.
   I am distracted by just about anything and everything. Sometimes I am just not in the mood to focus on anything. Most of the time it’s just because I don’t shut my email and IM off. Or maybe it’s that somehow I think I can browse the web and work at the same time. It’s time to put these things on a schedule and turn them off while I focus on work.
3. I get bored of things easily and leave a lot of my personal tasks unfinished.
   I tried to “distract” myself from writing this several times. Some of it is work related, other parts of it are a mental block (which means it got boring or I thought something else was more important). The reason it made it here is I pushed myself to get it done even after the glamour of it wore off. See, some of my thinking is already paying off. Right? On to the next item…
4. I procrastinate doing the things I should and do things I shouldn’t do instead.
   This article is case in point. I shouldn’t really be writing it. But I did and will end up working late because of it. The main reason why I did it is because I’m tired of doing this to myself over and over. Not to mention, I have this strange idea that writing about it will help me solve the problem. Honestly it isn’t working, yet.
5. I find it hard to commit to things that I do not immediately see value or success in doing.
   Call it a fear of failure or greedy motivations. Both of these ultimately undermine the quality of the work performed. I find that as time goes on I am less and less constrained by this limitation; nonetheless I still pep talk myself. You can’t win if you never try, so don’t let failure or your greed hold you back (and question moving forward on greed alone).
6. I often set myself up for failure by expecting way too much from myself.
   The main side effect of this problem is over-committing oneself. I do wonder if the driving factor is the desire to please others. Regardless of the source of the problem it’s time to think things through and be sure to triple the amount of work you think is required. It’s probably still not enough (especially if you procrastinate as I address in item #4) but you have a much better chance of getting things done on time.
7. I have a tendency to solve problems the easy way versus taking more time now to make things easier later.
   This is a tough one and most of the time the easy way is the better way for the sake of being simple. Sometimes it is pretty obvious that there is a better solution but because I’ve procrastinated doing the task, or I’ve become bored with it and I’d just rather get it out of my hair, I go for the quick and easy solution. This leads to unexpected surprises as time goes on. Stop procrastinating, remember the last time your great idea blew up in your face and, do things the right way.
8. There is little perceived (or immediate) benefit to fixing these problems.
   This is tough for those who have grown up in the 90s, with the cornucopia of instant gratification. I’m reticent to apply the discipline I know I need and I’d prefer to scrape by because it is intrinsically easier for me to do so right NOW. It’s time for a change – I’ve got to move my cheese so to speak. Put forth the effort now, put everything you have into what you do, and the rewards will surely follow in droves.

In the end you must remain inspired. Don’t kick yourself for lost or spoiled opportunties – learn from the experience and try, try again. The world is full of opportuntity, you just have to capture it when you see it and don’t hold back!

Traffic continues to trickle in through my little 100 pixel pi on the page. It must be the blue Viagra pill right next to my ad (and drunken old folks missing it when trying to click). I admonish that I’m rather disappointed in the final presentation my pixel ad offers – the shaded 400 pixel version came out looking much better, but being the cheap bastard that I am, it was enough to give away the $100 for what I got.

I recently modified my Million Dollar Link to forward to a new site I setup called pixelsmagnified.com. Yeah that’s right. I started “Yet Another Lame Million Dollar Hompage Copy-Cat”. As you can see it’s not working. Why? Probably because even if you could get a spot on the page FOREVER, there’s not much other attraction to see the page for the average joe. Did I really think it was going to succeed? No – I’m just greedy.

Contemplation has set in. What should I do to make that more effective? I’m still thinking about it, but I hope I can come up with something original – perhaps something even cool. Will it involve pixel advertisements? Nope – I think it’s clear to anyone with half a brain that this is a one hit wonder. Perhaps something of a spin-off might succeed, but this one is locked, loaded and spent.

If you would like to keep track of just how many clicks that little spot of pixels receives, watch the traffic counters I setup at statcounter.com. The stats started Dec 30 and go forward. Prior to that I had received approximately 280 visits from the ad.

In the meantime I promise to continue my coverage in all over mundane interests I happen across.

I’ve been watching his auction out of curiosity mostly. I originally thought he’d be good to generate another $50,000, maybe $100,000 for those final pixels (based on Alex’s indication that the winner would receive additional PR). I checked out his auction today and nearly fell out of my chair. The latest bid for his last 1,000 pixels was $6,001,100 from a newly registered user named dkeene7! A little bit further and “the Million Dollar Homepage” becomes a very big understatement.

Upon further examination, I have noted that the preposterously obscene bids have been removed and the top bid now apparently stands at $152,100 from a user named ast1155td. While this number is a bit more reasonable, it still beats my estimate of $100,000, and is 15 times the cost paid by those who got in earlier. I guess I am glad I bought my ad when I did!

Nevertheless time will tell just how far the bidding goes on this last batch of pixels. Just a bit under 6 days left to go and it’s obvious there’s still plenty of interest in this one. Got some money burning a hole in your bank account? Why not go blow it on a 1,000 pixel ad on the Million Dollar Homepage!

I’m left wondering if Alex will mention the astronomical bids the auction received today and why they were removed. Of course we can all speculate that the bids were bogus and made by someone just for the benefit of driving the price up. Or perhaps it was the same folks that helped this guy avoid paying 1,000 pounds for a PICTURE of a 42″ Plasma TV.

If you can’t see yourself paying for an ad on a million dollar homepage, maybe you can help this guy save his penis. Until next time…