My keyboard doesn’t work 🙁 His geekness Laen Finehack offered this solution . Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> Accessibility -> On Screen Keyboard
How to type without a keyboard
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My keyboard doesn’t work 🙁 His geekness Laen Finehack offered this solution . Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> Accessibility -> On Screen Keyboard
and it works too. Amazing! Hooray for his geekness!
you could also maybe pick up a cheap usb external keyboard on ebay….starting to miss your posts!
My laptop is still under warranty. I paid 400 dollars for the warranty.
However I have to call Dells tech service in the Philippines and get them to agree that it is a hardware problem before a tech person will come and fix it.
I call with the problems of : a non-working keyboard, laptop does not hibernate, and to turn on the computer I need to unplug the machine and take out the battery and reinstall it.
Their solution? Purge the hard drive and reinstall windows. However I couldn’t do that because the keyboard didn’t work in DOS.
After hours on the phone and much instance that the non working keyboard was a hardware issue they sent me another keyboard. I then had to call the Philippines and get a non-native speaker to walk me through how to replace the keyboard on my laptop.
Since the computer still has the power issues that Dell-Philippines insists are software problems they said I needed to purge my hard drive and reinstall windows. I stayed on the phone with them and did all that and still the computer didn’t work properly.
The problems have been compounded by Dell not sending the right utilities disk when I originally bought the computer. The tech people say that they now no longer have the right disk to send. So I have to down load them from the internet. Only problem is they are big big files and I didn’t have the right driver to get wireless to work.
Now they say it is a bios problem and that I need to update the bios, only when I go to the Dell site it doesn’t download the bios properly because of some Dell driver apps bug.
I hate my computer.
Dells tech support warranty is a big scam. You can’t talk to an American. All you get is an SE Asian with a script in front of them. They don’t have any independent knowledge of the computer at all.
They are totally incapable of independent thought. They just work from a script. A computer could provide the service they provide. They didn’t even understand what hibernation was.
So what happen is, I got caught in a loop and there is no way they will agree that it is a hardware issue.
Sorry for the rant but, man, I hate my Dell computer and Dell’s tech support.
Maybe some day I’ll figure out a way to get Dell to honor the warranty they sold me, or maybe some day I’ll buy a Mac, or maybe I will do the smart thing and opt out of having a computer.
Ask to speak to a supervisory technician because you have no way of understanding what they’re saying. The supervisors usually have less of an accent and aren’t scripted. The employees are always just looking up everything into the search box no matter what you ask them–I’ve had the same experience from all sorts of different corporate companies.
All computers are subject to failure–macs included. The best solution for someone in your position (living in a remote area, no computer repair shop nearby, not much knowledge of fixing computers yourself nor adequate tools) is to simply resign yourself to the fact that computers are going to break eventually and then toss them when they do just that.
I paid $259 for a refurbished Dell Mini10v netbook recently, plus shipping, plus another $80 for a separate external DVD. Everything works fine, as with the other five Dell refurbished computers I’ve bought for myself or other people other the past decade. But I fully expect something to break within a year or two. Like the keyboard, or the power supply, or maybe one of the USB ports will bust loose from the soldering, or the external DVD drive will crap out, etc. When that happens, I’ll buy a new computer. The computer before this (another refurbishged Dell) cost about $400 and lasted 2 years before the internal CD driver broke and then another 2 years before the power supply broken when I dropped it. $200/year on computer hardware is not a lot. And owning a computer is absolutely essential nowadays for most people, so going without is not realistic.
A friend of mine is a video specialist and works with Macs. Once he spent over $5000 on a high-end Mac that had a problem whereby it started failing intermittently once it got heated up inside, which took several hours. Read that previous sentence again. Several hours of run-time before the problem shows itself, and then it only shows up intermittently. Naturally, when he sent the unit back to Apple, they could find nothing wrong. I forget what the resolution to this problem was, but it didn’t come easy. He wasn’t in a financial position to eat a $5000 loss, nor are most people. Which is why I recommend cheap computers for most people. Then if something goes wrong, you just toss the thing and try again. It was be very bad luck to have multiple flaky computers from a reputable company, and both Dell and Apple are just that. But a flaky computer now and then is quite realistic, at least if you have any experience with how computers are put together inside.
Never buy warranties on cheap equipment.
I know it sounds like I’m just shilling for Dell, but I just think you are going about this all wrong, especially given your remote situation. Given how much you’ve already sunk into this current computer, I suppose you’ll have to continue down the road you are on. But don’t make the same mistake in the future. If you can’t fix things yourself, then keep them cheap and disposable.
I am a mac person, have been since the late 80’s. I agree that macs are machines and all machines can and will break, that being said I’ve had good luck with the 15 or so macs I’ve owned and when there has been a problem (with two of the 15) Apple fixed it immediately. Which is why I keep going back and drinking the Cupertino Kool Aid I guess.
But before you buy a mac…it is very difficult to find 12v power adapters for macs, Apple doesn’t sell anything but an airplane adapter which won’t work with a standard 12v outlet, so basically you only have a couple options, they are slightly hacked together. There is a guy who calls himself MacGyver who converts and sells 12v car adapters for macbooks, and they are costly. Your other option would be to use an inverter of course. Given the in-efficencies of converting 12v to 110v you might be better off staying in PC land versus relying on an inverter to power a mac laptop.
There is also a “mac-tax”, ie, you pay more for a similarly equipped mac than a PC. Macs also retain their value, so a macbook you buy for 999 today will be still worth 600 bucks in three years, whereas a 400 dollar Dell will be worth…basically nothing in three years. I avoid the mac tax by buying used macs and accepting that I don’t have the latest greatest fastest mostest, just what I need.
Maybe a gently used Dell laptop would serve your needs.
You might want to look at things like the asus netbook (win xp reasonable performance and cheap). I’d also keep my files on a usb disk drive so that when (not if) the machine crashes you still have your data. We’ve become sort of “electro-nomads” with respect to the machines – the cpu and storage that used to be central is just stuff -the trail of computing- and the data resides on something that moves from machine to machine (and often OS to OS )