I bought an Apple mouse back in August and after a week of playing around with it, never really got it to work. It would detect but when it claimed to have been connected it just wasn’t. I would look at this box

wiggle the mouse and… nothing. I tried again a few days ago and it seems all my pain was due to a lack of patience. While I waited for 10 seconds and giving up I should have taken my time since XP was figuring out that I didn’t have the code to pair the mouse and it was going to have to ask me for it. This can take 30 seconds or so.  So, to fix it I waited until the pop up box asked me for the code (0000) and then it paired successfully. It now works every time which is just awesome.

My new problem is getting it to synch every time i reboot…

I love my Samsung NC10 Netbook, I really do. I put in a 500Gb drive, upgraded the ram to 2Gb and put in a FM transmitter and Mini SD card reader. I’ve opened it so many times its missing half the screws… But it has, or rather had, a rather annoying problem. A few months ago the fan started to occasionally make some noise. It got louder and louder and I took it apart to blow the dust out a few times but it was still noisy.

Finally last week it stopped turning altogether. I had already been to a couple of local store here in Costa Rica to see if I could get a replacement part. They told me to try e-bay… At least on e-bay the replacements were only £14-24, getting a new one from a site in the UK would be £50… That’s 1/6 the cost of the unit, and its only a year old!

I had a crappy fan blowing air at the back of it but Melissa (my new gf) and I wanted to head to Nicaragua tomorrow for the weekend, so this wasn’t a good solution. I took it apart again, removed the fan/heatsink and blasted it with WD-40. I was barely turning at all. I tried finding how the fan attached to the heatsink and gave it a knock which led to the fan disconnecting entirely.

It seems the fan is only really attached by the force of the magnets in the moving part and presumably this was full of dust and gunk, slowing and eventually stopping the fan. I blasted the inside with more oil, wiped off the excess, put it back together and … it now works!!

Try this before you send yours to the repair place or pay £50 for a new fan!

I searched Google for this when I first got my Samsung netbook but didn’t find an answer. Usually I’m happy to work in 1024×600, my netbooks native resolution, but I use Photoshop and I often get this…

Which usually entails going into settings and changing the resolution manually, and when you’re done changing them back. You can avoid all this hassle with a simple keyboard short cut.

Hold Shift and Fn and then press the Right arrow key to increase the resolution up, Left to decrease it. If you press Shift + Fn + Up it resets to the native resolution.

It works on my Samsung NC10, try it on yours and leave me a comment if it works…..

Look inside the USB iPod lead.

The outer 2 connectors are longer than the middle 2. So if you slowly push the USB lead not all the way in until those 2 hit the power rail your iPod will charge and your computer won’t even know its there.