Laptop Display Issues Part-I: Understanding Display Assembly Diagram

Hola Amigas!

I can understand your anger over my not coming up with any article for nearly 6 months now! 

To compensate, in the next two blogs, I am gonna try to help you to understand to troubleshoot one of the most common issues in laptops these days i.e. of Display. [I thank Samiksha for the motivation for this blog!]

But before we deep dive into troubleshooting steps, lets try to understand the architecture of display in a common laptop.

This structure will also help you in bargaining with local laptop repairs mechanics as you can specifically ask them to tell you the issues and correspondingly you can weigh in your monitory options.

So lets rock and roll:

The basic structure of a laptop display is something like this:

As you can see, there are just 4 basic parts. Let's try to understand them in layman's terms:

#1: Video Cable is responsible for: 
      a. Carrying display signals from Motherboard (or video card) at point 1 to LCD screen at point 2
      b. In most cases, it also supplying the necessary voltage to the FL Inverter board at point 3

Video cable typically costs somewhere about INR 500/- in e-com sites

#2: FL Inverter board is responsible for:
      a. Converting low DC received at point 3 to high voltage AC at point 4.
          i. This is then fed to the CCFL (backlight bulb)

If an issue exists at this component, when you turn on the laptop, the LCD screen (backlight bulb) will not light up. Nevertheless, you will be able to see a very dim image on the laptop screen.

This component is gonna cost you around INR 1000-1500 in e-com sites

#3: CCFL (backlight bulb): 
When the backlight bulb lights up, you can see an images on the LCD screen. In most cases the backlight bulb is a part of the LCD screen and if it’s bad, the entire screen has to be replaced. By the way, some specialized repair shops can replace the backlight bulb itself.

Buying this is an expensive affair and you may have to shell out more than INR 5k+

#4:Lid close switch:
The lid close switch is a small button that locates close to the display hinges. On some newer models there is no button, because the switch is magnetic. You can set up your laptop to go to a hibernation mode or to a standby mode when the LCD is closed via power management software. These modes are triggered when the display is closed and the lid close switch is pressed down. If the LCD screen on your laptop will not light up when you open the display assembly, check the lid close switch is stuck inside (it might happen because the switch is dirty). 


So, I tried to explain in simple terms about the display set-up of a common laptop. Hope this helps to bargain for prices next time you visit the repair shop.

Got queries, post them in the comments sections below.

El descanso es proximo!

Au Revoir :)

Find Out Publishing Date Of Any Article

Hi Friends!

Hope you all are doing good. It took some time for me to write here as my schedule had become quite hectic in the last few months.

During my previous endeavours, I had to do a lot of secondary research. But you all know that, if you have to read 60+ articles, easiest way to filter the results while Googling!

But many a times, Google does not show the published date of the articles and because even the article does not have any date mentioned on it, you are uncertain about the age of the article.

So, I share two methods of achieving this:

Method 1:

I thank my friend Shashank for helping me in this. So here it goes:

#1: Suppose, I am searching for pdf on literacy rates, so my original search will be something like:
                                                          informat: pdf literacy rate

[and the address bar will be like this: https://www.google.co.in/search?q=informat%3A+pdf+literacy+rate&oq=informat%3A+pdf+literacy+rate&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.18910j0j7&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8]

Now the trick lies in passing one more parameter in the query string [what ever is after ? in URL is known as query string, its a key-value pair and one of the easiest way to pass values between pages]

So we will add &as_qdr=y15 to the query string and now the query string will look like
[https://www.google.co.in/search?q=informat%3A+pdf+literacy+rate&oq=informat%3A+pdf+literacy+rate&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.18910j0j7&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8&as_qdr=y15]

Method 2:

Open Internet Archive Wayback Machine, [URL: http://archive.org/web/]

Paste the URL in the box and Voila you can track the history of the article since the beginning of time!

Happy Searching!

Regards,
Vipul

If you know any other method, please share it with me on the comments section.

Google Little Known Tricks - Part 1

Holla Guys!

Today, I am going to write a small post on how Google's caters to the child inside you!

Trick #1

Here, we will learn to play Atari Breakout on Google images. So let's get started:

#1: Open Google Images. URL: https://images.google.com/

#2: Search Atari Breakout and start playing:

Trick #2

You can rotate your Google search screen 360 degrees like the way you have seen in MS Powerpoint

#1: Search for do a barrel roll on Google and wait and watch!

Trick #3:

To bypass proxy in China where Google was banned, this trick was of utmost importance:

Google when spelled backwards becomes elgooG, But the interesting fact is that you can use http://www.elgoog.im for searches.

Rest is Next.

Cheers!

Get Flipkart's Item Details in an Excel File Using jQuery

Hi fellas!

Kak bbl Bce? [pardon my Russian, I just meant to ask, "how are you all?"] :P

Today we are going to replicate some functionality of WebHarvy Web Scrapper. You can get more documentation on this tool at its official website, https://www.webharvy.com/ [wait for my new posts on this!]

So, in today's blog, we will try to retrieve data from Flipkart after making a search for laptop into an excel file using jQuery (a client side scripting language, can read about it at http://jquery.com/ or wait for my new posts).

I recommend Google Chrome for this trick! So let's get started:

#1: Open Google Chrome. Navigate to Flikart.com and then search for laptop and hit enter

#2: Press F12 (in laptops, you may have to press Fn + F12 simultaneously). You will see Web Developer window, either at the bottom or at the right side of the web page.

Click on Console 

#3: Now paste the following code into the "Area for writing jQuery scripts"

var title="";

var price="";

var html="<table><tr><td>Title</td><td>Price</td></tr>";

$('#products .gd-col').each(function(){

title=$(this).find('.pu-title a').text();

price=$(this).find('.pu-price .pu-final span').text();

var tempdetails="<tr><td>"+title+"</td><td>"+price+"</td></tr>";

html=html+tempdetails;

});

html=html+"</table>";

window.open('data:application/vnd.ms-excel,' + encodeURIComponent(html));

and hit Enter. You may receive download exception. In that case, select the radio button which says to allow download from this web-site.

#4: There will be an excel file downloaded to your system. Open it

You may receive format error. Don't worry about that, click Yes

And that's it! You have all the data in an excel format available at your disposal. You can tweak the code to include other options in separate columns in excel.

I have tested the code in Chrome, and not sure about how it behaves in Mozilla or IE. 

Please use the comment section to let me know the result of running this code on other browsers.

El descanso es proximo!

Adios.

Reset Firefox to its Default State

Hi pals!

I wish you all a very happy new year and welcome you to this exiting world of tips and tricks. May our learning be exponential this year!

We begin this year by learning to reset Mozilla Firefox to its default state.

Now why would you do this?
Possible explanation are to get rid of Extensions and themes, website permissions, user styles and social features, download actions, plugin settings, toolbar customizations etc.
But Firefox saves certain things as well. You can get a complete list from here

So let's get started:

#1: Find the 3 horizontal lines on the Toolbar and follow the steps in screenshot:

#2: Click on Troubleshooting Information

#3: Click on the Reset Firefox button as shown below:

That's it. Once done, you will see Old Firefox Data folder on your systems' desktop

This folder will help you to restore some important old data from your old Firefox. I will talk about it in my later blogs.


Wish you a very happy new year again!

Cheers!
Vipul