twistedgenes.com - Blogs by Rakesh Gupta » Hardware http://www.twistedgenes.com Blogs on truth, technology, food, linux, leisure, experiences, adventure, romance, friends etc ! Sat, 12 Jun 2010 14:24:46 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 How to crash a DELL laptop in seconds and unscrew it (with a video) http://www.twistedgenes.com/2008/12/how-to-crash-a-dell-laptop-in-seconds-and-unscrew-it-with-a-video/ http://www.twistedgenes.com/2008/12/how-to-crash-a-dell-laptop-in-seconds-and-unscrew-it-with-a-video/#comments Thu, 25 Dec 2008 11:01:17 +0000 Rakesh http://www.twistedgenes.com/?p=165 P.S. The whole video/literature etc. is not targeted to malign the manufacturer and is rather based on writer’s personal experience. No offense meant.

A brief intro on how it happened

It all started with my adamant attitude to have a dual partition on my Dell Vostro 1510. Fedora, my obvious choice led to multiple crash of the lappy’s motherboard. The reason sounds strange, but is the concrete reason, as it happened not once but rather twice. Burnt the ISO image of Fedora Core 10 on a DVD and began to boot the lappy. It started normal, but before the UI asking for Fedora installation could load, the laptop hung with nothing shown on the LCD. Forceful shutdown and subsequent reboot led to weird behavior, caps lock, num lock and scroll LEDs glowing indefinitely, without anything up on the LCD. The usual methods of removing the RAM, resetting the static electricity failed to work and it turned out that it was a motherboard failure. Hence a replace for the same was done by the manufacturer.

Video

The video below is shootout of the replacement of the motherboard. ( Done by manufacturer’s engineer). But you may give a try on your old laptop or if your eagerness could not be held anymore.
Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part5

Part 6

Part 7

How did we capture and process the video

The video capture was done using a Sony Ericsson phone and which resulted in multiple 3gp files. It was essential to merger these multiple files and convert them into flv format for upload using some tool. ffmpeg was the ideal option and worked like a wonder. Key steps were …

-> Converting indiviual 3GP files to flv with all the parameters viz. bitrate, frame etc

ffmpeg -i file.3gp -s 320×240 -vcodec h263 -r 25000 -b 200 -ab 64 -acodec amr -ac 1 -ar 8000 file.flv

-> Merge all files into single. This method somehow did not work with flv files, hence they were converted to mpg format and back to flv for upload to youtube.

converting to mpg with same parameters

ffmpeg -i file.flv -sameq -y file.mpg

Merging into single file

cat 76.mpg 77.mpg 78.mpg 79.mpg 80.mpg >final_mpg.mpg(This method somehow did not work with flv files)

And finally, back to flv file

ffmpeg -i final_mpg.mpg -sameq final.flv

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