Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Upgrade...

When I went back to Thailand last year, I had a chance to go shopping at Pantip Plaza. The first reason is that I had to find additional memory for Boss' Fujitsu laptop. It first came with only 512MB DDR2 533 and was not enough for her to manage things. To upgrade, we decided to buy 2 of 1GB DDR2 533 SO-DIMMs and everything works just fine.

The second reason is that my NEC laptop (almost 3 yo) component was broken, the Toshiba's DVD-RW drive. It began to get sick 3-4 months ago. First, it couldn't read and burn DVD-R, followed by DVD and CD-R. Of course, I needed a replacement and decided to replace it with DVD+/-RW (DL) drive. It's very hard to find such component (an internal laptop optical drive) in Australia. Fortunately, it's not that hard to find this in Thailand (and cheaper).

After cruised in Pantip for sometimes, I found one shop (on 3rd floor) that sold the drive I wanted in a very reasonable price :). I got a Lite-on Slimtype SOSW-833S DVD+/-RW (the barcode on it says it is a Teac drive, though) at 2,680 THB. Also, I got a 100GB WD 2.5" Harddisk to replace my old harddisk (it's still healthy but too small) at 3,200 THB (around AU$114). WOW, how cheap the hardwares in Thailand, I love it!

After came back, I replaced the old DVD drive with the new one. At first boot, BIOS did not recognise it!!! but it worked properly in Windows XP. It could read and burn all medias I gave to it (except DVD-RAM, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, of course). Besides, Windows recognised it as a secondary IDE slave!!!. I didn't realise the problem until I decided to replace the harddisk. After finishing harddisk installation, I had to reinstall OSes and my box couldn't boot from CD.... ??? What the heck!!?? BIOS did not know the existing of the DVD drive. I rectified the problem by reinstalled the old DVD drive (lucky enough, it still can read CD) and install Windows XP.

After googling around, I found that the drive came with slave location as default and that prevented auto detection from BIOS, meaning that this drive, as slave, can't be used to boot my laptop. The problem is the drive is jumper free so I couldn't set it to be master to use it to boot the box. Luckily, after some more google, I found that Lite-on corp. released a software that can alter the status of the slimtype jumper-free drive and downloaded it from here. I used it to change the location from slave to master and rebooted. Voila! the drive turned to master and BIOS has recognised it. Finally, I could boot with CD and installed Kubuntu Edgy Eft to the new hard drive.


Phew~~ that was close... -"-


For now, all components and everything run just fine... ^_^

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