Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Obama may lose

You know, anything can happen come November 4th. :)

A cousin forwarded me this funny video below depicting one such scenario:




This and other similar videos have been doing the rounds on the web lately; the other cool one I found was about an ordinary person (like yourself) running for president except that this one is perhaps closer to the present situation as far as the elections go.

North Carolina is one of the battleground states in this election, for the first time in many years and both candidates are neck-and-neck over here. That is why Mr. Obama is speaking in downtown Raleigh right now urging people to vote early. I'm really hoping this state goes BLUE, which would be the first time it's done that since 1976 would you believe! So, fingers crossed over this one.

Friday, October 24, 2008

You know you're getting old when...

... people you went to school with are getting married! :S

I feel weird.

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Inspiron 1525 Sleep / Hibernation Issues

As you all know, I proudly proclaimed myself to be a proud owner of a DELL Inspiron 1525 couple of months back here. Little did I know that it was infamous for it's sleep and hibernation issues. Apparently, this model has had this problem for a while and it's amazing that DELL are still rolling out new models without fixing it! :S

The problem has been reported in Inspirons that have been rolled out pre-installed with Vista SP1. For some reason, I did not come across it until after a couple of weeks of using it. The problem is that whenever I tried hibernating my system, it would hibernate and then wake up immediately; if I tried putting it in sleep mode, the system would restart and take me to the screen with safe mode options that come up as a result abnormal windows shutdown. Also, this problem did not occur everytime and was sort of random at first (at least thats what I thought). Apparently, the problem lies with the 1395 Dell wireless adapter and turning it off manually seems to solve it.

Therefore, to save other people some distress and hours of scouring the web for possible solutions to this annoying problem, I'm listing some helpful web pages that describe the problem in detail and offer other users' accounts of the problem and how they solved it. Don't get me wrong though, the laptop is still fantastic and worth every single penny, it's just that you'd expect a company like Dell to do away with such problems quickly or maybe it's more of a Vista problem than Dell's - frankly, as an end-user I don't care!

Browsing the Dell forums, you'll find posts by people venting their frustration over the same problem here, here and here. There's even a Microsoft TechNet article about the problem here. The solution that worked for me can be found here and here, and I'm reproducing it below. So, here's what you need to do:

Go to Control Panel > System > Device Manager. Expand the node that says 'Network Adapters' and look for Dell Wireless 1395 WLAN Mini-Card under it, as shown below. Right-click on that, and from the context menu that appears, click on Properties.

You'll find yourself on the window shown below. Click on the Power Management tab, and uncheck the option highlighted in the screenshot below.

This is of course a workaround to a problem that shouldn't really occur on a Dell system, and even if it did, should have been fixed by now. There are other solutions to it, like reverting the BIOS to an earlier version (A09) but I didn't wanna get into the hassle of that, especially with so much important data on my system. So, here's a quick way of fixing this problem but it does come with some side effects. You'll notice a slight power drain on the batteries since the Wifi-card would never be automatically turned off by Vista now, hence the extra power consumption. You could still manually turn it off though when you're not using it, to save yourself some power.

Hopefully, this saved you considerable time in debugging the problem and finding a fix for that. I know I could've done with a straight-forward answer since I ended up playing with the settings of all hardware that could potentially wake up my computer. Anyway, alls well that ends well I guess. I'm a bit disappointed at Dell about marring this great laptop with a nasty problem like this. Hope this solution helped!

Update: Turns out it is a Vista issue - specifically an issue with SP1 - and has been witnessed on other laptops as well. Here's one example.

Thursday, October 09, 2008

Dolphins Lose Again!

Too bad the Karachi Dolphins ended up being second-best to Sialkot YET AGAIN! Why is it that every team I support either performs miserably or fails at the very last hurdle? My beloved team Toon aka Newcastle United are struggling at the bottom of the English Premier League, my beloved country Pakistan is reeling from an economic crisis of epic proportions right now with no end to it in sight. Our president is proudly begging for a $100 billion bail-out, as if the rest of the world is waiting in the wings to help us. Frankly, they have enough problems of their own right now owing to the great economic recession that has engulfed the world. So don't hold your breath on that, but you know with all the doom and gloom surrounding the country at the moment, it was nice to see attention diverted to something fun and light-hearted, even if it lasted for just a few days. The harsh reality is that we will not see international cricket in the country for god knows how long and us fans will be starved of quality cricket for the foreseeable future. Also, our national team hasn’t lived up to its expectations lately (come to think of it, has anything associated with Pakistan done good of late?) and I would, personally, love to see them getting back to winning ways whether they play at home or abroad. I'd rather bet on them than on our President when it comes to turning around their respective fortunes.

Monday, October 06, 2008

WTH?!

Zardari: India 'not a threat to Pakistan'

So, we were just fooling around with them when our two armies almost went to war in 2001 was it? And the Kargil conflict, and the two wars, and the seemingly never-ending arms race - as ridiculous as that may be given how poor both countries are!

What the !@#% is he talking about?!