Tag Archives: Hardware

MSNE4K Fail.

I had bought two of those the Microsoft NaturalĀ® Ergonomic 4000 keyboards. The (newer) one at home has started failing. I’m guessing its part from all the button mashing games. The problem presented as spurious ‘x’ (like around 50 of them) coming in when the OS/Bios initialized the keyboard and then no more ‘x’, even when you type.

MSNE4K internals

MSNE4K internals

First time it occured, I shook it, vacuumed it and it started working. Second time it happened I opened it up I found snack fragments mostly from Lays. Cleaned it up and it started functioning normally. Today its messed up the third time and after an hour of moving the membrane around (or rather praying and hoping it works) its working.

In case you have one of these and want to dissassemble here is the thing: After all the screws on the bottom are removed, pull out the soft wrist padding pieces. Then you’d find two more screws to be removed. Then pry the space bar out (carefully) to find the two final smaller screws.

I thought they would not screw hardware up and wished it was more durable.

Madness is real.

I took the leap of faith, bought i7 930 based rig with insanely expensive motherboard (ASUS P6T Deluxe v2). Linux is up with my old installation with the following changes to kernel:

  • Add Yukon etherenet support (sky2.ko module).
  • Add w83627ehf module for sensors.
  • AHCI for disks (Which borked the windows 7 install; fixable by enabling ahci in windows registry)
  • And ofcourse SMP (incase you did not have it).
  • Proprietary nvidia drivers for the video card.

Funny my DRAM speed went down to 1066 Mhz (from 1333) cant recollect why. Now I’ve ‘set’ it to 1333.