Techie Coach Tutorials

My laptop isn’t ancient.  It’s a dell inspiron 9100 … and it serves most of my purposes fine (which periodically involve needing to ‘compute’ from the couch or the bed) … but after 2 1/2 years of wear and tear the power cord started to get ‘fitzy.’

‘Fitzy how?’ you ask?  : ) …  Well it started by only ‘powering’ when it was in a specific position … and the position got more and more inconvient until last week I had to actually drape it over the screen of the keyboard and hold it in order for the power to connect.  Now the battery was fine … so it wasn’t as tho I was losing work when the power would cut out.  But it was annoying as hell. 

I looked around at new laptops, since there are other reasons to upgrade (namely this laptop weighs a ton!) … but I’m not hearing good things about Vista … so I’d rather not go there until some of the early bugs are worked out.  So I decided if I could fix the laptop for under $100 … it’d be worth it to try.

DELL

I started at Dell and they had what I needed (actually called an Assembly 150-Watt AC Adapter) except that it was

• refurbished
• $90, and
• ships in 1-2 weeks

I wasn’t crazy about the refurbished part … but the main dealbreaker was that I didn’t think my powercord was going to hang on for 2 more weeks.

Laptop Parts Now

So I googled ‘laptop power adapters’ and found Laptop Parts Now … who had exactly what I was looking for,  they called it the Dell Inspiron 9100, PP09L Series Replacement Laptop AC Adapter and even better it was

• new
• $49,
• usually ships same business day

Just to be certain I checked that the Dell product compatibility matched (N3834 - yup!). 

And with 2-day shipping I still spent less than what Dell wanted to charge me for the refurbished part.  (Oh, and an added bonus the new one is both lighter and smaller than the orignal!)

The $50 Fix

The part arrived, as ordered, 2 days later.  I plugged it in and ‘voila!’ it’s working beautifully.  

The moral of the story … if your laptop is working fine … but cuts back to battery power even when the power cord is plugged in … a new ac adapter might be just what the doctor ordered.  And you too might be able to squeeze another year or so out of the your laptop, and for $50 the price can’t be beat!

Addendum

I wanted to also give credit to Foner Books who had an illustrated guide to reparing laptop cords … and if I couldn’t find anything else … I might have tried it.  But frankly, I’d prefer to have a backup solution in place before I start taking things apart. (Not all that confident in my ability to put it back together again.)

And the Frequently Asked Question is:
(actually I found and answered this on Yahoo Answers from Henry C, but it’s a good one!)

Q: Hey Techie Coach, how do I use the numeric keypad on a dell inspiron e1705 laptop?

A: The solution is to use both the Number Lock and Fn keys.

• First, the Number Lock must be on.
  On my Inspiron 9100 it’s located above the F11 key: ‘Num Lk’
  There’s a light that turns on when you activate it to show you that it’s on. (again, on the 9100 it’s the first of 3 lights above the keyboard, and to the left of the power button. The icon below it is tiny, but it’s got a 9 inside a lock - thus Number Lock). Once number lock is on …
• Then hold down the blue Fn key.
  Second key in from the bottom left of the keyboard, right beside the Ctrl key: ‘Fn’ written in blue.
  Hold the Fn key down with your left hand (I use pinkie or thumb, actually) and type the number pad keys (also in in blue) with your right hand. (So M=0, J=1, K=2, etc.).

Just remember, you have to keep holding the Fn key the whole time or you revert back to letters.

Hope this helps, and Happy Numbering!

Wondering where the drop down menus went?!    Yeah … me too.  I admit I don’t use IE very much anymore … so this didn’t come up until I was trying to help Myrna troubleshoot why her blog was showing up differently in IE vs. Firefox vs. AOL … but suddenly it was very important (and annoying!) to discover the unexpected absence of drop down menus. 

Dang.

It turns out the Microsoft has hidden them in an effort to give you more room for browsing.  (Which in theory makes sense … until you look at how much room the buttons and toolbars take up compared to the drop down menus … but I digress) …

Want your menus back? 

Hit the ALT key.  Seriously … that’s all it takes.