Free Tower PC to give away

Thanks to our customer John & Jennifer Henderson who donated two PCs to the workshop, and it can be a great first computer for kids.

It comes with Intel Pentium(R) 4 3.00GHz CPU and was 512MB RAM. We upgraded the RAM to 1.5GB. The hard drive is 120GB IDE and had been securely wiped up. The PS/2 keyboard and mouse will be with the Tower PC, however, as we don't have spare monitor at the moment, you will have to buy one yourself. Officeworks had special $65.00 for 17" monitor before, not sure if still available, but they always have 21" for $98.00

Tedious keyboard replacement tasks

Laptop keyboard replacement is fairly straight forward and simple, though some of them require a bit of patience or skill. There are, however, two types of keyboard replacement I did really tedious.

Macbook Pro Retina 13"

The original keyboard is mounted with rivets and when you pull the problem keyboard off, you virtually have to snap and break th rivets. After that, there are 54 tiny screws waiting for you, but luckily you can at least buy the tiny screws somewhere.

Wake up your computer on demand without WoL

Whether you don't want to keep your home lab computers on 24/7 for security reason or just want to be environmentally friendly and save energy, you want to be able to switch on/wake up your computer on demand.

The popular way to achieve this is utilise WoL - Wake On Lan, an old technology back in 1997. Basically you can turn on your computer from anywhere. It involves configure your Router, set up a DDNS and turn on WoL BIOS features. We won't discuss details here today, rather, we target the computers that do not support WoL in their BIOS.

Fix for fresh Windows 7 installation BSOD C000021a Fatal System Error 0xc0000001 0x00100448

Patient: Toshiba Satellite A300D PSAH8A-01J00H, Vista 2GB RAM 320GB HDD BIOS 1.8

This model can only be found on Toshiba Europe website and was sold in Australia. No BIOS/drivers update found from Toshiba. No A series from Satellite family and there is a A series in Satellite Pro family but no A300D product.

Unable to install/update Windows 10 Store apps error 0x80240013

 

1. Windows Store Apps troubleshooter

 

Click Start > Settings > Update & security > Troubleshoot
Scroll down to the bottom
Click Windows Store Apps
Click Run the troubleshooter

 

Try to runing troubleshooter a couple of times

2. Reset Windows Store
Press Windows key + R
Type: wsreset.exe
Hit Enter
Try to reset a couuple of times again

3.  Reset Software Distribution folder

Windows 10 on Old Macs

Windows 10 on old mac
This is Windows 10 on MacbookPro 5,5

We all know that Apple encourage people to upgrade all the time and to buy new product, just like the Windows 10 on Bootcamp, any Macbook Pro, Air, Mini server before 2012 is not supported and Mac Pro before 2013 is not supported as well.

How your computer gets hacked by sneaky Trojans/Backdoor

 

We had a customer coming with infected laptop last month and the laptop was actually remotely controlled by the cybercriminal without her awareness. She didn't know how this happened, but after analyzing her recent activities, she realized it was just an email sent from the "friend".

Here is a demonstration how the Trojans get into our Windows computers by emails.

An email came in this morning declaring "Remittance copy from bank". I was interested in this kind of emails while expecting some payments.