Then you start your repair research process. You find a replacement LCD screen from a vendor in the UK called mobilephonecrazy.com. You buy the replacement part and wait for it to arrive.  While you wait you start looking for the instructions or videos that show you how to replace the LCD screen….nada, nothing. Not even any service manual documentation from Dell’s web site.

The part arrives and you call your buddy with the all the phone repair tools and you start to figure out how to disassemble the phone. Here is what the Dell Venue Pro looks like disassembled

Here is the breakdown of the pieces:

A – This is the rear of the glass and LCD once removed. You can see the ribbon cables that connect to the video card through the whole in piece B

B – This is the sliding mechanism and the mounting point for the front screen and the motherboard C

C – The motherboard. There are additional ribbon cable connectors.

D – This is the back of the phone. The silver part with the holes is the inner side of the battery compartment. The little piece to the right of D is the camera button that falls out when you take the phone apart.

E – These are the 6 torx screws that are in the back of the case

F -  These are the 4 torx screws that are removed to get the LCD and glass front disconnected from B

G – These are the 2 screw covers that are at the top of the back side of the slider piece

H – This is the back cover of the phone

I – These are the two tools you need. The Torx screwdriver and the pry tool

J – The phone battery

Disassembly process

Unfortunately I did not think ahead to bring a good camera or a camcorder to record the process, but here is what you have to do to disassemble the phone.

1) Take off the back battery cover

2) Remove 6 screws using torx screwdriver

3) Using a pry tool, work the back cover off. There are small tabs that keep the cover on. You must unseat the tabs all around the chrome back and black ends, there are also tabs on the inside of the battery cover box that you will need to pop out.. Note the camera button will fall out when you get it off. You may have to remove the black tape covering the SD card slot to loosen the inside tabs.

4) Motherboard is now exposed. There are 4 cables to remove. Use a pry tool to pop the connectors. Two have short cables that plug into the motherboard on one side. Two have longer cables that come from the LCD screen through the sliding mechanism. There is a small cable at the top that has a rubber grommet that goes over a post, you must loosen the grommet using a needle or other tool to get under the cable.

5) Once the motherboard is off, there are 4 screws to remove. If you open the sliding mechanism all the way you will find two screws through the metal sliding mechanism and then there are two other screws with round covers at the top back of the screen. Use a pin to pry off the covers, they are sticky.

6) Once the screws are loose, you can pry the glass cover piece off from the side and ends, more tabs. The cover is stuck on typically so you will need to work it loose.

7) Once open, there is another cable connector. There is a metal flap that you can flip up slightly and pry lose the connector. Once you have that lose, you can use the long cables to remove the LCD from the glass. Be sure not to touch the inside of the glass.

8) Replace the LCD and reverse the disassembly process. Do not forget to put the camera button back in before you put the back cover on. You will have to hold the phone vertically with the camera button down to keep it in place.

9) Make sure all the tabs are snapped back into place, especially on the ends of the phone.

It took us about 30 minutes to figure this out from scratch with no instructions. If I did it again, I probably could do it in 10 minutes.  The pry tool is very important. It needs to have a thin blade to get in the slider gap and pry off the cover at the chrome edges.

Hope this helps someone rescue their Dell Venue Pro from a bad fall.

If you are looking for the largest 7200 RPM disk that you can get in the 9.5mm size, you should look at the new Seagate Momentus 750 GB drive (Model ST9750420AS) or the SAMSUNG Spinpoint 640GB drive (Model MP4 HM640JJ).

If you are looking for SSD like performance, need large amounts of disk space, but do not have the funds to pay for SSD, there is a new line of hybrid drives that combine 7200 RPM and SSD technology to achieve performance between a pure 7200 RPM and SSD technology drive. Seagate Momentus XT  500 GB drive (Model ST95005620AS) is currently the largest size available.

So if you are looking for size, performance, or a combination of both, you now have new options to investigate.

I am currently testing the 500 GB hybrid drive from Seagate and have had a great experience so far....hope you also have a great experience.

In a perfect world, when you are working on a testing scenario that includes a DC and multiple members of the domain, when you need to snapshot one of the machines in the test scenario, you would snapshot all of the VMs in the test scenario and you would do it at the exact same instant in time. This means that all the VMs would be saved in an ideal configuration.

The problem with that perfect world is that you might want to snapshot a single machine to perform a what-if test and then be able to roll back if the idea is a bust. But if you do not snapshot all the VMs at the same instance, you run the risk of one of the machines changing it’s secure channel password during the what-if period. When you revert the changes during that session and you attempt to login, you will get an error message saying that the trust relationship with the domain controller is broken. You only option is to remove and re-add the machine to the domain.

There is a solution to this problem. You can disable the computer account from changing its secure channel password or you can change the password change window to something longer than the default 30 days. Doing so will eliminate the issue of not being able to login. Now would you want to do this in a production environment, not without fully understanding the changes and the security risks.

To make the change, open up your favorite GPO editor and go to

Computer Configuration\Windows Settings\Security Settings\Local Policies\Security Options\

Enable the Domain Member: Disable machine account password changes option

or

Edit the Domain Member: Maximum machine account password age option and increase the value from the default of 30 days to a new larger value (up to a maximum of 999 days)

Doing either of these options should keep you from getting the dreadful message that the secure channel is broken.

Hope this helps you some day…..Robert

I have been researching netbooks for a few weeks and had decided that I wanted something with at least a 11” screen. I looked at all the usual suspects Acer, Lenovo, Dell, etc… and then I cam across one that struck my eye, a Gateway LT3114U netbook from BestBuy. 

(Note that if you want the Cherry Red model you can only seem to buy it online, but you can walk into a BestBuy and buy the black model….I found this out the hard way and had to wait two extra days for my machine while a coworker rubbed it in with his.)

For those who do not know, Acer bought Gateway. This netbook is a slightly redesigned version of the Acer Aspire One 11.6” model.  The Gateway version comes  with an 11.6” screen 2GB RAM, 250 GB 5400 RPM hard drive, 6 Cell battery, and Vista Basic. This version if the netbook is based on a AMD Athlon 64-bit processor for netbooks. So you can actually install a 64-bit OS.

I have been playing with the configuration and have done the following:

- swapped the 5400 RPM drive for a 7200 RPM drive

- swapped the 2GB RAM module for a 4GB RAM module (Yes it will take a 4GB module)

- swapped the Vista Basic for Windows 7 Ultimate x64

The cool and completely unexpected swap was the RAM upgrade.  The specs said it only takes a 2GB module, but I had heard rumors at work that it would support a 4GB module, so I thought I would try it.  In this configuration I get 3.75 GB of usable RAM (256 GB is for the shared video HyperMemory.

The 7200 RPM makes it run a little hotter, mainly because I took and older 100GB drive I had lying around to do the test. So one of the new generation 7200 RPM drive would probably solve that issue.

The Video performance is decent.  I can watch hulu videos as normal resolution. At full screen they are slightly jumpy.

So far I have been pretty impressed by the performance under Windows 7. I am currently running under 2GB while I wait for an additional 4GB module.

Go check one out yourself…..

The entry also has links to additional information on RVI and other AMD technology. It is good reference and read.

You can find the official announcement from Microsoft Press here

Sample chapters are available on Janique’s web site using the links here:

Table of Contents

Chapter 2 (Hyper-V Overview)

Chapter 8 (Moving from Virtual Server 2005 R2 to Hyper-V)

Index

We hope you find the book informative and full of guidance and best practices to help you plan, deploy, and manage a single Hyper-V server to a large farm of Hyper-V servers.

Thanks to all of the Microsoft team that helped us write, review, edit, and publish this book.

1) Install Windows Server 2008 R2 on your notebook (I am using a Lenovo T61P), but leave about 20GB of free space available.

2) Install all the roles and features on your machine….here is what I have

- Hyper-V role
- Desktop Experience feature
- Wireless LAN
- Windows Server Backup

3) Run Windows update to get any driver updates….you will end up with multiple missing device drivers in Device Manager.

4) On that additional 20 GB partition, install Windows 7 x64 Enterprise or Ultimate

5) Run Windows update on the Windows 7 installation until all yellow bangs are resolved (this might take a couple of reboots)

6) Now reboot into the Windows Server 2008 R2 installation, open Device Manager

7) For each yellow bang, right click it and say Update Driver Software, when you get the dialog, select Browse my computer for driver software

8) In the dropdown box at the top of the screen, browse to the drive that has Windows 7 installed and go to Drive:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository, Click Next

9) The new driver should be found and automatically installed.

10) Repeat for all other drivers.

When you are done, you should have Windows 7 x64 drivers installed (except for the Bluetooth driver probably)

Hope that helps you fellow Windows Server 2008 R2 users….

Here is a preview of the TOC.

1. Introduction to Virtualization
2. Overview
3. Architecture
4. Installation and Deployment
5. Advanced Features
6. Security
7. Best Practices and Optimization
8. Moving from Virtual Server 2005 R2 to Hyper-V
9. Hyper-V R2
10. Management Overview
11. Single Server Management
12. Server Farm Management Using SCVMM
13. Backup and Recovery
14. Server Migration using SCVMM
15. Server Monitoring using SCOM
16. Management using PowerShell
17. Server Virtualization Scenarios
18. Virtualization Project – Envisioning
19. Virtualization Project – Discovery
20. Virtualization Project – Assessment
21. Virtualization Project – Planning and Design
22. Virtualization Project - Pilot

It is over 700 pages long…

For more information visit http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/Books/11842.aspx

These cabinets from makers like StarTech and AMS, have built in hardware RAID functionality that allow you to configure the dual drives in a RAID configuration without requiring a RAID card in your machine. Typically RAID 1 (mirroring) and RAID 0 (striping) are the two most common approaches in a dual drive case.

BUT, these external cases rely on a technology called Port Multiplication to see all the drives. You can go read the detailed description at your favorite web site, but basically port multiplication allows you to have multiple drives accessible through a single eSATA port. The catch is that the eSATA interface must support Port Multiplication.

This is where the issue is with integrated eSATA ports in laptops and desktop motherboards.  They do not all support port multiplication…actually very few do.

I found this out the hard way recently. I purchased a new high end workstation class notebook that has an integrated eSATA port. the port I found out does not support port multiplication. If you attempt to connect an external case to the eSATA port and the drives are in RAID mode, the port will not be able to understand which drive it is talking to and the entire machine will slow to a crawl. Even if you attempt to configure the dual drives as JBOD, the ports will only see the 1st drive.

How do you deal with this issue?  You use an ExpressCard with port multiplication support or use only a single drive case connected to the internal eSATA port.

Hope this saves you hours of headache…

Hyper-V R2 has provided the ability to manage the address pool directly in the Virtual Network Manager. To manage the global MAC address pool, open up Virtual Network Manager and select the MAC Address Range option under Global Network Settings. From here you can modify the MAC address pool available on the managed Hyper-V host.

Note that making this change does not fix any existing assigned MAC addresses from the original pool. Therefore if you need to change the MAC address used or modify the range of addresses, you should make this change prior to creating the first virtual machine.

If virtual machines have already been created, then you have two options to change the MAC address.

1) Modify the MAC address assignment to static and assign a static MAC address to the virtual network adapter.

2) Remove and re add the virtual network adapter in the virtual machine and a new dynamic MAC address from the pool will be assigned.