As luck would have it, the install went smoothly and I have a pair of the cards working in a brand new Core i5 machine as I type this.




Good luck!

Disassembly is rather straight forward. Unplug all wires from the back of the radio. Remove the FM antenna then remove the mounting nut from the f-connector. The radio is held together by 6 deeply recessed phillips screws accessible from the back. The shaft of the screwdriver should be 3 inches long and thin. After removing the 6 screws, gently pull forward on the front of the radio. There will be multiple wires that need to be unplugged. Gently unplug all the wires from the front of the radio. All the plugs on the front control board are different sizes so matching up the connectors on reassembly will be easy. With all the wires unplugged and the front removed you should be seeing this:

Looking at the plastic covering the power transformer, you may notice that it is bowed or warped. Now for a look at the bottom of the circuit board.

The AC power from the power jack connects directly to the power transformer, no inline fuse. Checking the continuity of the 120 vac input of the power transformer reveals an open circuit. It would appear that the primary of the power transformer has burned up. Now lets skip ahead a bit. We will come back to the transformer.

An overload or short circuit on the secondary of a power transformer is a common cause of transformer failure. From the above picture we can see that there are 3 center-tapped secondary windings on the power transformer. Lets flip this board over and check the rectifier diodes.

The HDR-1 uses a full wave bridge rectifier module to power the audio output stage and 2 diodes each (circled in yellow) to power the 3.3 vdc and 12 vdc regulators. A quick check with an ohmmeter will show one or both of the diodes on the 12 vdc supply shorted. Here is where we find the factory error. All 4 of the circled diodes are part number 1N5817. The 1N5817 is rated at 14 volts rms and 20 volts peak. The ac voltage for the 12 vdc circuit from the transformer is ~15 vac. Whoops! These diodes are operating right at their voltage limit. A small voltage spike, such as switching on an appliance or light, is all that is needed to overload these diodes.

Later production runs used part number 1N4003 diodes (200 volt @ 1 amp) so lets replace all four 1N5817 diodes with the correct 1N4003 part number. Now back to the transformer.

Looking at the primary side of the power transformer we can see the two power input terminals (red dots). There is also a terminal that does not go through the circuit board (yellow dot). This transformer has a internal thermal fuse between In1 and the yellow dot terminal. The primary winding is between the yellow dot terminal and In2. To restore power to the transformer just add an external 1 amp 120 volt fuse between the yellow terminal and In1. The new external 1 amp fuse will actually provide better protection. In case of a short, the old thermal fuse required the transformer to heat up to trip it, the new 1 amp fuse will blow nearly instantly. Of the 19 Sangean HDR-1 radios I have repaired, every one had this problem.

For added protection, I added a 130 vac MOV across the transformer primary. This is optional, but provides cheap overvoltage protection.

While we have this radio open, there are a few inexpensive upgrades we can perform to increase the sound quality.

The 8 pin IC circled in the above picture is a JRC4580D opamp which is used as the audio preamp. The JRC4580D is a rather noisy low end opamp with limited bandwidth. For an upgrade go with a OPA2134 or a NE5532 opamp.
The four capacitors circled above feed audio into the opamp. Ideally they should be bipolar capacitors, but the factory has used polarized capacitors. For replacement use a bipolar capacitor such as the Nichicon Muse ES series with the same rating of 1 uf @ 50 volts. At this point you will notice a greatly improved sound quality as compared to a stock Sangean HDR-1.

The two capacitors in the above picture filter the power to the audio amplifier. If you like your music loud or with a lot of bass then these capacitors could use an upgrade. The factory parts are rated at 3300 uf @ 25 vdc. For an upgrade a pair of 5600 uf @ 25 vdc capacitors works great.

Total cost of parts for repair and upgrade is about $10 US.

Whenever I tried to write a post, the visual editor would load, but then the buttons would disappear. On top of that, none of the text I typed would show up either. A “select all” showed that my text did in fact exist, but it was displayed as white text on the visual editor’s white background. Stranger still, the HTML editor worked just fine.

I tried working through all sorts of solutions offered up online including a reinstall of WordPress, troubleshooting plugins, and even checking file permissions on the wp-includes and wp-admin directories.

None of these solutions worked, but as I dug through the blog’s admin pages, I saw something strange. As you can see in the picture below (click to enlarge), the WordPress and Site Address fields both show a colon appended to the URL. The problem is a strange result of how WordPress was installed as well as how the web host has configured our account. Removing the colons fixed the problem immediately, and will likely remedy your issues as well.

As a final note, this fix works on WordPress 3.2.1 but should apply to any past or future releases of the software.

• Type: update-manager -d
• Perform any additional required updates before install
• Enter your password, agree to upgrade and such

I did all that, then waited for 45 minutes -  now it is say Error: Forbidden 403, WHAT THE HELL?!

It’s terminal time my friends.

• type: sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list
• click replace in the search menu
• Replacehttp://us.archive.ubuntu.comwith

  ftp://us.archive.ubuntu.com
  

• Restart your upgrade. Don’t worry no time was lost since it kept all the downloads even though it reverted the installation. Ubuntu so smart.

Have fun and remember.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Then, late one night, I stumbled across a pc repair book on Google that had multiple hits from my search. On a side section it had the following: “Advice from Ron Morse Incorrectly set memory timing parameters in BIOS may prevent the machine from operating at all. Some systems with intel chipsets, when presented with out-of-bounds memory timing parameters during POST, simply lock up. This happens before the video or any other devices are initialized, so the machine appears totally dead. Using the jumper to clear the CMOS to default values is frequently the only remedy.”

After acquiring two new sticks of RAM, while upgrading the size at the same time, my issue was resolved. My only guess is that after rebooting, the auto configuration the BIOS grabbed from the first boot wasn’t valid due to bad timings on the RAM and the reboot simply wouldn’t work with the auto configuration.  Why it doesn’t happen on the first boot is anybody’s guess, but changing out the RAM caused the issue to completely disappear.  I probably could have messed with the timings in the BIOS, but it was clear that the RAM was bad in the first place and there was no need to keep those sticks installed. If you experience a similar issue, keep in mind that CMOS may have incorrect settings and/or your memory could be faulty.

So you started drinking early and put some regrettable images up on Facebook, or really spoke your mind on Twitter.  You could just bury your head in the sand and avoid all those people you said nasty things about, or you can make them appear as if it never occurred with “Last night never happened“.

This “morning after” iPhone app will automatically scrub your Facebook and Twitter account, removing pictures and posts for the time period you specify. It won’t completely save you from your drunken rantings, but it’s a good start.

[via Gizmodo]

Even if you would never have bought a Mac for yourself, surely you would feel no shame in winning one.  Would you?

[CLICK HERE TO GO TO HIS SITE TO SIGN UP]

For some reason, ks.sys was causing the computer to crash, and upon looking into it, I discovered that ks.sys is related to the computer’s sound card. That made sense to me, as the Logitech installer was adding its own microphone drivers to the mix. What didn’t make sense to me was the actual reason behind the blue screens of death.

Upon further investigation and poking around in the Logitech support forums, I found that my Western Digital SmartWare was the culprit. I have a WD Passport drive, which requires the SmartWare application in order to access the hardware-encrypted data on the drive. It seems that the associated services cause the ks.sys fault, for some unknown reason. The only solution that anyone has seemed to come up with is to stop the Western Digital services while the Logitech installer is running, then restart the services afterwards.

So, I did just that, and my installation went off without any more problems. If you are experiencing the same problem, stop the following services before installation, and then restart them afterwards:

WD File Management Engine
WD File Management Shadow Engine
WDDM Service