Verdict: The new battery fixes the keyboard lag.

Unfortunately, laptop batteries are often quite expensive. So, while buying and installing a new battery will cure your laptop of keyboard lag, it’ll also clear your wallet of your cash. Lightweight desktop or larger credit card bill… what will you choose?

At the company I work for, we have about 10 Dell laptops for the employees to use to do their energy audits and such. We have a few other laptops (Lenovos and Acers) laying around, but that’s unimportant. What is important is that two of the 10 Dell laptops developed a very strange keyboard lag. And one of them is just plain dead, but that’s also unimportant.

“Keyboard lag?!?!?,” you say? Yes. This is the problem: while typing, the characters on the screen would severely lag behind the keyboard keystrokes. So much, in fact, that they were practically unusable. The good news, though, is that there is a free, albeit not so great, solution to fix it.

Now, I’m not sure what the hardware problem behind this is, but to fix it, all I had to do was remove the battery. That’s right. Removing the battery from the laptop, and running it solely off the power supply, cured the keystroke lagging problem. Battery alone, lag. Battery plus power supply, lag. Power supply only, no lag.

Because of this cure, we now have two not-so-portable laptops at my office. Would purchasing new batteries fix the problem? Possibly. To test this, I’m probably going to end up attaching the battery from the dead Dell laptop up to the laptop with the keyboard lag, since they’re the same model. I actually didn’t think about that until just now. Once I perform this test, I will let you know the results.

And, oh yeah, the two models that are afflicted with this disease are different, and like 2 years apart. So it’s not just the model, it’s Dell.

Until next time…

The other night, it was raining, but not too hard. I was sitting in my living room, watching the ol’ boob-tube, when there was a power surge. I knew it was a surge (and not a quick blackout) because the light that was illuminating the room got a lot brighter instead of going out.

So, since it was a surge, my surge protector on the TV did its job, and ended up turning off everything connected to it. It also required a reset, which I thought was kind of weird.

The weirdest thing, though, that happened from the power surge, was the reset of my Linksys WRT54GS router.

It didn’t blow it. It just reset it.

Therefore, with a quick reconfiguration, it was good and usable again.

Interesting, eh?

Originally, I was one of those people who said, “Why would I get that, when, for the same price, I could get a full-sized laptop that dwarfs those puny netbooks in speed and functionality?” Was.

Really, what did it for me was the need (want) for a laptop. My roommates are always playing with their laptops downstairs, and I get jealous. For example, if I wanted to get in on an internet poker game they were playing, I’d have to either play on the HTPC, or go upstairs to the four-core powerhouse. The HTPC, while being quite feasible, is a bit ridiculous to play on because of the 42-inch “monitor” it’s connected to. That left me with the powerhouse — and that left me alone, upstairs.

I might post up a review at some point, although I modified it right after I bought it, so the review wouldn’t really be fair. We’ll see. If anyone genuinely wants to see a review/write-up, let me know. If I get more than 2 responses, I’ll definitely write something up.

As always: keep it real.

So yeah, the PRO and the Duo… passable. What starts to get me is that HG. You’re pushing it with just the HG, Sony. Then you have the tact to add the HX? Are you kidding me?

I get that it’s a new product. Give it a new name… like the Memory Stick HG. That wasn’t taken, was it? Come on.. c’..c’..c’mon. No, seriously. Come on.

To sum it up, one word: bleh.

Me either. That is, until today.

I thought that it was pretty sweet, so I decided to write a how-to. That way, you too can play Old Snakey.

Good luck trying to beat my sweet high score!

Click here to learn how to play Old Snakey.

Honestly, I’m not sure why peeps be hatin’ on XHTML 1.0 Transitional. I mean, yeah, some aspects of it are supposed to be deprecated, but really, we’re never doing away with the align attribute, nor the target attribute. I don’t think, anyway. A browser maker would have to be straight up stupid to do something like that. Half the pages on the interwebz wouldn’t work right without a browser parsing those attributes, so no one would use it.

I like transitional, but I guess I’ll try to code in XTML Strict from now on. Maybe some day it’ll be worth it.

If you read this, consider shooting me an e-mail or leaving a comment.  Let me know what you think of the new site design.  You can do so anonymously, which means you can trash it all you want, and there will be no repercussions.  And if you feel like the design deserves it, please do.

Seriously.  I want feedback, even if it’s negative.

Thanks!

Therefore, there may just be a new review to go along with the new design I’ve been working on.

Speaking of the new design, it’s pretty sweet looking so far. I’m actually really close to being finished, so it should be up within the next couple of days. Hopefully you’ll like it as much as I do.

I’m going to try and make it look as professional as possible, and have it be completely viewable at 800×600 (something I like to do with all websites I make).

Here we go!