Personal Note: iPhone 4S screen replacement

I spent a good 2 hours on Wednesday evening replacing a cracked iPhone 4S screen. I actually labeled every little thing that I took off the iPhone 4S and took pictures of each major steps. I won’t bother posting any of the instructions since apparently someone else such as iFixit has done so.

iPhone-4S-broken-screen

iPhone-4S-screen-replaced

Those bubbles on the replacement screen is courtesy of the shipping cover of the screen.

MacBook Pro SMC Firmware Update 1.7

Apple releases MacBook Pro SMC Firmware Update 1.7 for:

  • MacBook Pro (15 and 17-inch, Early 2011)
  • MacBook Pro (15 and 17-inch, Mid 2010)

About MacBook Pro SMC Firmware Update 1.7
This update addresses a rare issue on some Apple notebooks where a battery that has accumulated more than 1000 charge cycles may unexpectedly shut down or stop functioning.

MacBook Pro purchase in 2010 can easily reached 1000 charge cycles by now.

MacBook-Pro-SMC-Firmware-Update-1.7

The bent pins

A few days a go my colleague and I were working on a computer which was having some odd problems. During the trouble shooting, I noticed something with the CPU socket.

Intel-Socket-1155

At a glance, there’s nothing wrong with the CPU socket, but upon a much closer inspection you can see where the problem is.

Intel-Socket-1155-bent-pin

Two pins were bent out of shape. It might be causing the computer to randomly crash.

SpinRite: Division Overflow Error!

This is one error that I’ve seen before in the past, but really rare with SpinRite. One computer at the office was having performance issue. How could a computer with Intel Core i7 be slower than one with Intel Pentium 4, which is the oldest computer in the office. After ruling out malware infestation, I suspected that the hard drive was the source of the problem. I then boot SpinRite on this computer to check the condition of the hard drive. Shortly after running Level 2 (emergency data recovery), SpinRite halted and displayed an error message.

Division Overflow Error!

A critical error occured at: B04E from which SpinRite CANNOT recover. The system has been halted!

I’ve just sent the screenshot to GRC support.

IMG_1168

It would be a lot easier for me to get a new hard drive and install a fresh operating system than waiting to get this hard drive repaired.

MacBook Pro and SanDisk Extreme SSD 480 GB

I’ve been getting a lot of request lately to install Solid State Disk (SSD) on laptops, especially MacBook Pro. One of my current favorite model is SanDisk Extreme SSD. This particular MacBook Pro is now armed with SanDisk Extreme SSD 480 GB. I also installed 8 GB of RAM.

MacBook Pro SanDisk SSD

Short of installing fresh Operating System per owner’s request, I use Carbon Copy Cloner. The only problem is that it took 8 hours to clone 400 GB of data through FireWire 800.

Carbon-Copy-Cloner-in-action

There’s Something About Java

Current news about Java vulnerabilities have been the talk of both tech and mainstream press. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued a warning of this vulnerability on Thursday January 10, 2013. On Friday January 11, 2013 we received numbers of called from users that their computers were infected by malware on that day. Security softwares such as Malwarebytes Anti-Malware and Microsoft Security Essentials detected the presence of malicious Java codes in the computers.

Companies like Apple and Mozilla Foundation have been pro-actively blocked Java on their platform.

Mozilla-blocks-Java

This is certainly not the first time Java has been exploited to deliver malware. Back in August 2012 similar outbreak of malware used Java vulnerability as point of entry. Oracle says that they are preparing an update to Java to address the vulnerability.