iPhone 3G and iOS4 is slow

by rex on August 28, 2010

iphone spotlight search - disable all

I still have a 3G and upgraded to iOS4 – which slowed mine to a crawl. It turns out that the Spotlight search feature was the main culprit. If you turn that off (which most people don’t use anyway), your iPhone will speed up drastically. It won’t be the same as iOS3.x, but it will be much better.

Here are the instructions:
  1. Settings..Home Button…Spotlight Search
  2. Uncheck everything
  3. Hard reset the phone twice
To perform a Hard Reset, press and hold the Home and Sleep/Wake buttons on your iPhone at the same time for 10-20 seconds. After a few seconds the Slide to Power Off notice will appear, ignore this and keep holding down both buttons. In another few seconds the device should abruptly turn off, followed by the Apple logo and a reboot. Now release the buttons.
If your iPhone remains powered off, wait about 15 seconds then boot the phone by pressing the Sleep/Wake button.

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HP Vista Code Purple

by rex on August 10, 2010

HP Code Purple

Turns out HP computers with Vista can have the same “code purple” issue when recovering to the out of the box state. This comes from the manufacturer’s tattoo on the motherboard.  Fortunately the solution is about the same as when I ranted about HP computers with the code purple and XP issue.

Here are the steps to fix it:

  • Download Ubuntu ISO from www.ubuntu.com
  • Burn the ISO to a CD (use CD Burner XP if you don’t have burning software that will do ISO files).
  • Set your BIOS to boot to CD if not already set
  • Boot to Ubuntu Live..Navigate to Places…(HP hard drive)…hp\bin\CheckDMI
  • Rename CheckDMI.cmd to CheckDMI.bak or simply delete it.
  • Shut down Ubuntu, remove the CD, restart to Windows

Alternate solution:

  • Remove the hard drive
  • Slave it into a working Windows PC or use a USB enclosure to plug into a working Windows PC
  • Follow the same steps as above for rename or delete

Click for a larger version

For other computer brands, follow the instructions above but look for the following file:

c:\SYSPREP\oobe.bat

There is an excellent (but long) discussion thread going on here.

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Suddenlink SMC8014WN Stupidity

May 5, 2010

Well this is interesting. I was considering becoming a reseller for Suddenlink Cable since I’ve been very pleased with their internet service. However, if you “rent” the SMC8014WN Wireless Modem/Router/AP from them – BEWARE! Suddenlink has locked down the firmware in the SMC8014WN so that most of the typical features from any $60 router/access point [...]

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Facebook Virus – Nope

May 4, 2010

As a reminder, there is NO SUCH THING AS A FACEBOOK VIRUS. Facebook is simply a webservice/site though your browser. Now, you can get an infection by clicking on a URL (link) that may send you to an outside webpage, which could be malicious. Then you could be infected, especially if you use Internet Exploder, [...]

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Google Apps Help

April 16, 2010

If your domain is using Google Apps for your Domain, which acts as the email server system, it receives all your mail (inbound and outbound) and processes it for spam, viruses, and phishing. This is done by pointing certain parts of your domain name (CNAME and MX records) to Google’s services. If you are an [...]

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WP-DBManager and MediaTemple Hosting

April 8, 2010

Ok – I ran into an odd issue while migrating my entire smartergeek.com site over to MediaTemple hosting – running WordPress and Thesis. Why did I move my site? I ran into a performance issue with GoDaddy’s hosting of WordPress and mySQL. My page times were taking between 3-49 seconds!.That’s crazy even for shared servers. [...]

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JungleDisk iPhone App

April 7, 2010

JungleDisk recently released their iPhone app. It allows you to directly access your cloud backup storage – which is really cool for several reasons. First, I can access my backup files (sent to the cloud every 24 hours) and attach files to an email if necessary. There have been several times that I’ve needed to [...]

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Dell Inspiron 1525 Windows 7 Install

April 4, 2010

I installed Windows 7 on a Dell Inspiron 1525 this weekend. It took less than 30 minutes with a brand new 640GB drive. Everything went nearly perfect – the only drivers that Win7 didn’t install was for a “Base System Device”, which was the Ricoh card reader. Here’s a direct link to the correct driver: [...]

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Wii and Netflix are cool

April 2, 2010

Well I just got my Netflix Streaming Disc for the Wii. Let me just say – it works really really well. The boys have watched it nearly non-stop. The movies stream in within a few seconds and just start playing. We have experienced only 1 instance of buffering for maybe a 1/4 second. You just [...]

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Ubuntu Banking – by Florida

March 29, 2010

I’ve preached my security sermon over and over. Now, here is a bank (yes, a bank) telling people to use an Ubuntu Live CD for their banking. Jay McLaughlin, CIO of CNL Bank: Accessing online banking from your everyday PC is just asking for trouble, he says. Your everyday pc? Yes – that means chances [...]

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