http://192.168.1.1/setup.cgi?next_file=adsl_driver.htm

This should give you:

DSL Noise Margin

DSL Attenuation

DSL Transmit Power

Anyway, todays tutorial is going to focus on fixing the 7610 keypad. My keypad became almost impossible to use and I’d never bothered to investigate the the problem. The keys had to be pressed with an almighty force to produce a keypress. I’d almost comitted the phone to bin, but it was worth a look first.

First I removed the battery, front fascia and plastic keypad. From here on a T6 Torx Screwdriver is required. There are 6 torx screws, but only the bottom 4 need to be removed to get the PCB keypad free.

Once you have these 4 torx screws out, the PCB keypad can be levered up at the bottom and gently slid downwards and removed. This is a delicate piece of kit so you need to take care. The keypad consists of a PCB with a white sticky label (membrane) on top, which holds the bubble contacts in place. Gently peel back the white sticky label, but don’t remove it from the PCB entirely (otherwise you’ll have to realign it later).

This is where I noticed the contacts on the membrane side were badly corroded. The contacts should be nice and shiny but mine had black spots dotted around. I used a mixture of Brasso metal polish and a small screwdriver and cotton bud to remove the dirt and polish the contacts. I also cleaned the PCB contacts before sticking the membrane back on to the PCB.

Having refitted the torx scews I fired up the phone and the origional keypress feel was restored. Result!

It has a fancy touchscreen colour LCD which flips out and rotates. I’ve always wondered how such movement is possible and I’d soon have the opportunity to answer my own question. Only a few days into the holiday and the LCD screen stopped working. Initially it was possible to view the screen when it was folded out to about 30 degrees. Opening it up to 90 degrees and the screen would simply switch off, it just went black. I knew the camera was still functional as the touch screen still worked – just I couldn’t see anything on it. The viewfinder in the camera still works too.

A quick look around the Internet turned up a whole load of people with the same problem. Some people suggested it could be the backlight in the LCD or a CCD Chip problem (Outlined here) but alas my model was not listed.

It was time to get the screwdriver and find the real cause of the problem. Removal of side panel on the camera was straight forward. It’s easy to slip and scratch the case, so I recommend using masking tape to cover the plastic to prevent damage. There are two small screws on the front of screen and one on the hinge. There are two further screws on the rear of the screen/hinge assembly which are only accessible by tilting the screen at an angle, then rotating it slightly. This allows removal of the LCD cover and you can inspect for loose ribbon cables. Mine looked fine so I had to move on to the main camera body.

The main body has about 4 or 5 really obvious screws holding the side on. There is one non obvious screw under the battery. As you remove this, it frees up a small piece of plastic which drops out (and is easily refitted afterwards). Now it’s just a case of carefully levering the side off. I used a small screwdriver, working my way from the bottom to the top of the camera body. It came free quite easily so don’t get too carried away with the levering. You need to be super careful at this point, as the side is still attached to the camera with several ribbon cables.

There should be enough room to look inside and see the back of the LCD hinge.  At least two ribbon cables seem to disappear into the back of the hinge. There is a small strip of sticky felt covering two further screws on the back of the LCD hinge. Remove these two and you should be able to lift up the semi-circle wedge of plastic. I then levered out a smaller piece of plastic which had a ribbon cable clipped into it.

This gave me a good view of the ribbon cable from the screen, past the hinge and on into the camera. I inspected this area closely. That’s when I found the problem. There are two ribbon cables back-to-back which cross the hinge and enter the LCD screen. Just inside the camera, one of the cables in the back-to-back arrangement had clearly split – it looked like someone had cleanly cut the cable with a pair of scissors. This ribbon cable must be replaced in order to restore the LCD to a working condition. Unfortunately I have yet to find a source for this cable. So despite finding the problem I have yet to repair it. In theory with the right ribbon cable it would be a very easy repair.

This is clearly a design fault which has been caused by the rotating screen. Overtime the copper/plastic ribbon cable has become weak and split. I must say I am not best pleased with this and feel that Sony should repair the camera free of charge, although I also believe that given another few years the problem would reoccur, unless the quality of the plastic ribbon cable is improved.

1. Enter the control panel and uninstall all the HP related software.
2. Unplug the USB connection – this step is very important.
3. Now, it is important to reboot the computer at this stage, to ensure you’re starting from a clean slate. Once rebooted you now need to download the HP removal software. There are various version of this. If you have a 7×00 series printer you’ll want the specific HP Software Removal Utility (recommended) or alternatively there is the more general All-in-One Software Removal Utility. Assuming you download the HP software removal utility, run the file and it will extract to C:/Temp/HP_WebRelease. Browse to this folder and look for uninstall_l4.bat. Running this file will perform what HP call a Level 4 cleanup – the highest level of HP rubbish removal.

****** Executing Level4 CleanUP ******
This cleanup utility will remove the HP Image Zone software and the
HP product drivers. Use this utility to remove software if you have a
problem using the software and would like to reinstall the software.

Use this LEVEL 4 cleanup if LEVEL 3 cleanup utility did not fix the problem
and you continue to experience software problems with your HP Officejet Pro

LEVEL 4 is the most comprehensive cleanup level and
will remove the HP product drivers, HP Image Zone software
and all HP components installed with your HP Officejet Pro device
****************

If you chose to UNINSTALL, Please do the following…
1. Unplug the USB cable from the back of your HP Officejet Pro device
2. After the cleanup finishes, restart your computer and wait for Windows
to start
3. Eject and re-insert the software CD that came with your HP Officejet Pro
device to start the installation
4. Follow the on-screen instructions to finish the installation
5. Try printing a document to confirm functionality
Press ENTER to continue Uninstalling…
OR
Press Q followed by ENTER to QUIT uninstallation

As per the instructions, just hit enter and wait for the uninstaller to complete.

Now reboot your computer again. Do NOT reconnect the printer yet.

You now need to download the latest verison of the HP All-in-one software from the HP website – don’t use the CD which came with it as this is most likely outdated. I chose the HP Officejet Pro Full Feature Software And Driver – weighing in at an almighty 300MB.

Once downloaded, run the setup file. The setup will prompt you when it is time to connect the printer.

Follow the installation as normal and you should have a working printer again.

I hope this helps you on your quest for a working HP printer!

We recently installed a new HP 2600n laser printer for a customer, it’s quite a cheap unit but seems to perform reasonably and is easy to deal with (excluding the below, of course). After installing the drivers on the server, we deployed the printer and tested it – all appeared to be working fine. However, a few print jobs later, the print queue decides to lock up. No more items are sent to the printer, however they are sitting in the queue.

We restarted the print spooler service, and all the jobs from the queue were fed to the printer and printed correctly – could it be a one off?

No would be the short answer to that one, later that week, the same thing happened again. The print queue still accepts jobs, but nothing is sent to the printer. Having decided to have a look through the printer options to see what could be done, it was decided that ‘Enable bidirectional support’ was a prime candidate for the chop.

The above can be found on the ports tab in printer properties. Unchecking this box resolved all the problems we were encountering, and the printer has gone for many weeks without freezing the print queue again.

Let us know if this solves the same issue for you!

The user ‘HP LaserJet 2300 Series PCL 6′ preference item in the ‘Common {<id>}’ Group Policy object did not apply because it failed with error code ‘0×8000ffff Catastrophic failure’ This error was suppressed.

This error is not very helpful as you can see, and infact turned out to be that the driver for the printer was not available. This led us into another issue – that of installing x86 drivers on the server to be available for clients when they connect.

Initially, we thought this would be easy. “Oh, just go into sharing and tick the x86 box in additional drivers”, we thought. Having tried to do that it turned out to be a lot more complex than it should be. Ticking this box will ask you to browse to find the x86 version of the x64 driver you currently have installed – easy. Then it will ask you to ‘please provide path to windows media (x86 processor)’ – OK, that’s doable?

It seems to be looking for the file ntprint.inf, and wanted to look on a CD-ROM, in the I386 folder by default. So, recognising the folder name we stuck in the XP pro disc, thinking we would be off, but alas, it tries to load the file and then gives the same prompt again! I then decided to search my own workstation (Vista Ultimate x86) for the the file and found the following directory to contain it, as well as an I386 folder.

C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\ntprint.inf_xxxxxx

I copied the contents of this directory to the same directory on the server which holds the x86 version of the driver in question, and then went into sharing and ticked the x86 box once more. It again asked for the path to the driver, but this time did not prompt asking for the additional media!

So, in conclusion, it seems you need both your x64 server and an x86 client available in order to get the driver installed, for our printer at least.

Our customer needed a replacement right away so the only viable option was to replace it with a new unit. This left us with the broken Officejet. It seemed a shame to throw away this otherwise fully working unit, and not being a fan of arguing with foreign tech-support on the phone for hours on end in order to extract a replacement from someone, I decided to try to resolve the problem myself.

In order to access the cartridge carrier, the machine has to be dismantled pretty much entirely. This is not a difficult process but can be quite tricky, as some screws are hard to access with a normal screwdriver. In some cases I used a socket wrench with a torx bit.

Once you’ve got to the cartridges, you then need to devise some way to restore the connections to the broken tracks. I first looked at bridging the tear, but once I saw how small the tracks were, the idea went out the window. The following is what I decided upon:

In order to find wire thin enough, I split a small piece of stranded cable from an old PSU, and used one strand to reconnect each of the disconnected pads back to the PCB itself. The plastic was scraped from the back of the pad and then the wire carefully soldered in to place. The other end was soldered directly to the appropriate pad on the green PCB, traced back from the tear. Each of the wires was then secured with a small piece of electrical tape, to prevent shorts and movement which might break the joint.

It works! It turned out that the 3 or 4 hours it took to do this wasn’t a complete waste of time – the machine now runs again, but for how long?