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Entry-level troubleshooting

Dave Farquhar Hardware June 15, 2012December 5, 2015antivirus, Ars Technica, capacitors, dell, hp, IBM, power button, troubleshooting

Ars Technica offers a very good, brief guide to troubleshooting computer hardware. Being two pages long, it doesn’t tell you everything, but includes some good tricks, including one I don’t always remember to tell people. To fully discharge a device, unplug it from the wall, remove the battery if it has one, then press and hold down the power button for 10-15 seconds. This discharges any power that could be lingering in the capacitors inside. Read more

Dave Farquhar

David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He started his career as a part-time computer technician in 1994, worked his way up to system administrator by 1997, and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He invests in real estate on the side and his hobbies include O gauge trains, baseball cards, and retro computers and video games. A University of Missouri graduate, he holds CISSP and Security+ certifications. He lives in St. Louis with his family.

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The future of flash memory might not be so bleak after all, either

Dave Farquhar Hardware February 24, 2012February 26, 2012hp

PC Perspective’s Allyn Malventano stopped in earlier this week and sent me a link to his take on the bleak future of SSDs and flash memory: http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Editorial/NAND-Flash-Memory-Future-Not-So-Bleak-After-All

He didn’t agree with me entirely–he argued that the problems outlined in the study in question are solvable.

Dave Farquhar

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SSD future isn’t bleak, just flash

Dave Farquhar Hardware February 17, 2012computerworld, hp, kingston

Computerworld is predicting that the end of the line for SSDs will be the year 2024.

That’s based on the projected year MLC flash memory becomes impractical to continue producing. There’s one problem with that assumption: it assumes SSDs will still be based on flash memory in 2024.

Dave Farquhar

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HP has a brilliant idea

Dave Farquhar Hardware February 16, 20121990s, acer, apple, asus, corsair, dell, hp, IBM, Micro Center, pc magazine, pc world, Super Bowl

After last year’s flip-flopping on getting rid of its not-quite-as-profitable-as-they’d-like PC business, and the resulting self sabotage, HP needed a good idea to try to undo the damage.

Their idea is completely unoriginal, but it’s tried and true and more likely to work than anything else they could possibly do: Bundle their premium PCs with premium-level customer service and charge a little more.

Dave Farquhar

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My Socket 775 adventures, Chapter 1

Dave Farquhar Hardware January 27, 2012January 28, 20211990s, amd, asus, Asus Socket, corsair, hp, intel, kingston, Micro Center, pentium d, power button

So I bought an Intel Socket 775 board to support a crash webserver rebuild project. I present the story in hopes that it might be useful, or entertaining, or both. I don’t know the ultimate outcome of it yet, but all of the decisions made sense at the time.
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Dave Farquhar

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HP open-sourcing Web OS is a gutsy move

Dave Farquhar Software December 13, 2011November 19, 2018android, apple, firefox, hp, mysql, oracle, SQL, web os

HP announced this week that it’s not going to sell Web OS–the operating system it bought the remnants of Palm to get–and plans to open-source the platform, as well as re-introduce tablets based on it sometime in the distant future.

The move isn’t guaranteed to work, but I think it’s a shrewd move.

Dave Farquhar

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Balancing safety and versatility

Dave Farquhar security December 2, 2011December 1, 20111980s, android, cyanogenmod, hp, IBM, john c dvorak, linksys, macintosh, networking equipment, proprietary unix, unix, vulnerability, wrt54g

John C Dvorak has a very simple solution to the HP printing problem. Lock down the firmware so it’s not upgradeable. And while we’re at it, do the same thing to routers and other equipment.

This solves the problem of loading rogue firmware on the devices, but there are several problems with such a draconian approach.
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Dave Farquhar

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Expect your HP printer to get 0wnz0r3d shortly

Dave Farquhar security November 30, 2011November 29, 2011hp, job description, laserjet, lexmark

Courtesy of Dan Bowman: You may have seen the brief writeup on Slashdot about how to set printers on fire by messing with the fuser, but in Germany next month there’s going to be a security engineer’s nightmare unleashed, courtesy of the HP printer that’s probably sitting a few feet outside your cubicle and mine.

And there’s a whole lot more to it than just messing with the fuser in hopes of killing a printer or (perhaps) starting a fire. There’s a lot more to a printer than toner and a fuser. As the link above says, a printer contains an embedded Linux or Vxworks system that’s trivially easy to install a rootkit on and that nobody’s paying attention to. Seriously, who watches traffic coming from the printer?

The possibilities are endless.
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Dave Farquhar

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Smart card problems and other Monday weirdness

Dave Farquhar Hardware November 29, 2011November 28, 2011capacitors, hp

My boss’ computer had a bad case of the Mondays this week. It took forever to come out of power saving mode, and then when it finally did, it was mostly unresponsive. He couldn’t log in, and the system didn’t even recognize his smartcard reader. The usual fix for a smartcard reader that won’t read and whose light doesn’t blink or come on is to unplug the card reader, wait a few seconds or a minute, and plug it back in, but even that didn’t help this time. Nor did plugging in a known-working reader.

The machine did respond to ctrl-alt-del, and the shutdown options weren’t disabled. Fortunately. So I did a full shutdown, which it did, under protest.
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Dave Farquhar

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HP decides to keep its PC business

Dave Farquhar Hardware October 28, 2011October 27, 2011hp, IBM, lenovo, oracle

HP came to its senses this week and decided that ex-CEO Leo Apotheker’s decision to pull out of the PC market he didn’t understand was a bad decision. They’re staying in.

Dave Farquhar

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