Using laptop stateside

kaimera

Hey,

I'm away on the J1 in a small few weeks and I want to bring my laptop to keep up to date with some work and whatnot.

I know there have been thread on buying stuff stateside and coming home but whats the deal going d'other way?

The powerpack for my laptop sez

Input: 100-240V~, 50/60hz 1.5A
Output: 19V

The powerpack for my external hdd also has the same input details.

I know voltage is different but will a irish plug to us plug converter work?

and how safe is carrying a laptop and hdd onboard? ie Will I lose any data?

Thanks in advance.

Ruu_Old

Yeah the converter will work just fine. Im here permanently so I got a US plug for my powerpack (Dell one, if you want you will probably get one for your lappy in Radioshack). You shouldnt lose any data carrying your stuff onboard.

kaimera

By converter, I just mean from 3-to-2 prong, not having to change the voltage yis?

Ruu_Old

Yeah works just fine.

kaimera

Excellent. ty

Tom Dunne

One tip, though - buy the plug adapter here, actually, buy 2 or 3 of them.

I found it incredibly difficult to buy a "UK" plug adapter over in the US.

kaimera

Where pray tell, can I buy them here?

TommyGun

You should be able to get them in the airport or Maplin or almost any Dixons, For Home, Atlantic, B&Q etc.

kaimera

Cool.

I'd prefer not to have to rely on picking them up in the airport the day I leave tho.

woohoo! trip to town :v:

netwhizkid

One Word, Radioshack.

kaimera

Two words.

Bull**** and ****.

My laptop screen is fubard right now. Tis all shakey and blurry. I didn't lose any data but what ****ing good is it if I can't see wtf I have onscreen. :mad:

Not sure if it was the multitude of airports I went thru already or the change in voltage thats causing the problem.

I have no battery to check.

Great ****ing way to start an fyp.

Bollocks.

kaimera

screenshot attached.



I can get a replacement screen for $100 + parts.

Arse.

No idea wtf caused the corruption of the screen.

Tom Dunne

Let's not panic just yet.

When you power on the laptop, can you clearly see the BIOS screen (or startup logo - the black screen)?

kaimera

Yea.

It boots fine, all loading screens are fine up till the login screen [which initially shows up fine but starts shimmering/shaking after a few seconds] then my desktop looks like above again after a few seconds.

Tom Dunne

Righty, so it may be a driver problem. I doubt very highly that it is the screen.

I don't know for a minute how the hell a driver would suddenly become corrupted (I've travelled all over with various laptops and not had a problem), but let's not worry about that for the time being.

See can you get into safe mode.

SOL

It cant be the screen if a print screen is garbled can it? It might be something horrible and electronic to do with the change in voltage and noise and you graphics card, have you tried it on a normal screen>?

BY which I mean plugged it into a monitor froom a PC?

kaimera

I didn't bring it with me atm but I'll check tomorrow when I'm back with it and try safe mode and if it works on a pc moniter.

I didn't get a voltage changer, just a plug converter from irish3 to us2 prong.

Kinda wary of trying my external hdd atm just in case.

[edit]
as for drivers, I'm running modded cats 6.4 on a mobility9000. Been stable for the last few months.

inode

ive heard myths about when your laptop goes through the scanner at the airport that it can totally messed it.

Tom Dunne

And it's nothing more than that - myths.

Speedway

im in Boston right now on my Irish laptop. Brought it here 3 months ago and its been plugged into the wall using the 3to2 prong adaptor almost every single day.never had even a hint of a problem.

it could've been anything, maybe a bit of dampness getting into the motherboard via the keyboard, or maybe something overheated if a vent was blocked

kaimera

It'll be another while today before I can get to it.

Doubt it was dampness, it was in my backpack as carry_on for all my flights, and I hadn't attempted to turn it on till this past friday. No vents blocked or anything of the like.

I'll get back wrt safe mode etc asap.

kaimera

Update:

Laptop boots fine into safe mode. No corruption at all.

I'm getting the ati uninstaller atm and I'm gonna try the original drivers for the card and see if it works, and I'm getting the 6.5 mobility cats just in case.

Tom Dunne

kaimera wrote:

Update:

Laptop boots fine into safe mode. No corruption at all.

The corruption I was talking about was possible display driver corruption - it wouldn't use the display driver in safe mode.

Were any changes made to the system (installation of hardware/software)? If so, try a system restore to a previous date.

It sounds like the screen is ok after all - would you agree? That makes things a little easier.

kaimera

Ya, screen would be ok after al

*phew*

Now the problem is...well lets see.

Rebooted into safe mode, ran the uninstaller again cos dev manager was showing the card as still installed, so clicked rollback and it rolled back to the original driver I had.
Rebooted.
Got a black screen post boot.
Rebooted into safe.
Used the cat uninstaller to remove driver.
Rebooted into windows.
All was fine
Added card when requested by windows using the original driver disk I had.
Clicked desktop props to change screen res...got corruption.
Removed driver again using the cat uninstaller.

Rebooted into windows again.

With no driver installed, my laptop runs fine. I can change colour depth and screen res without any **** happening.

Is my mobility9000 borked?

Nothing had been added/removed since college ended and even at that, it was running fine after. I had it divx-ing movies for a day solid is all. [it did crash after about a day of doing that tho, I didn't turn it on after as I had a flight the next day]

Any ideas now that it's been narrowed down some more?

thanks for the help tho.

TommyGun

kaimera wrote:

Yea.

It boots fine, all loading screens are fine up till the login screen [which initially shows up fine but starts shimmering/shaking after a few seconds] then my desktop looks like above again after a few seconds.

This looks like a LCD Cable problem

Did you re-seat the LCD cable to the motherboard, this may help.

I had a similar problem and the LCD cable was defective, I had to get it replaced.

Tom Dunne

TommyGun wrote:

This looks like a LCD Cable problem

Did you re-seat the LCD cable to the motherboard, this may help.

I had a similar problem and the LCD cable was defective, I had to get it replaced.

I think we have established that it is a driver problem.

kaimera wrote:

Is my mobility9000 borked?

I wouldn't think so. I had problems with my Radeon Mobility 9100 drivers. There wasn't an exact match on the ATI website, so I had to try a few different ones before I got one to work.

kaimera

Right, well no drivers that I try will work without corruption.

I tried the 6.4 cats, modded them to mobility cards but no success. I'm wary of trying the 6.5s aswell.

Even the original driver causes corruption.

The only way it'll be fine is right now, when I don't install any graphics drivers at all.

I can still resize my screen to 1024x768 @ 32bpp.

Only thing is the New HW wizard everytime I boot into windows but I can live with that for the minute.

Any ideas?

Kudos

O

M

G

You do a computer course which i had to repeat a semester of and even *i* am not that retarded. How could it ever have been the screen? That's probably the stupidest thing any of us has done since we started college, well computer related anyway.

Hope things are well over there, apart from the becoming retarded thing. :P

kaimera

How could it have been the screen?

Well, my bro's lappy had a dodgy screen but up till I took the screenshot and saw that was dodgy I couldn't discount it now could I ya muppet

:rolleyes:

How about helping with the driver issue jonny?

cormie

just about the plugs, I'm going to Spain, if I get a plug converter, is it ok to plug an Irish 4 way adapter into a Spanish plug and plug everything into that as I normally would?

Peteee

kaimera wrote:

Well, my bro's lappy had a dodgy screen but up till I took the screenshot and saw that was dodgy I couldn't discount it now could I ya muppet

Taking a screenshot is all well and good, but posting it up and saying somet about a replacment screen.....:p

As for the drivers, seems like Windows being its finicky. Nuke it and start again.