February 12, 2007

Changing the HDD in a Panasonic Let’s note R3

Yesterday my HDD finnally gave up. Lately the notebook became slower and slower and the HDD louder and louder. After opening the small lid on the right side, I realized that there is no 1,8″ HDD built in. In fact its a normal 2.5″ but for replacing the HDD the whole notebook had to be disassembled.

The second difficulty was that the HDD is not a normal 5V no it is a 3.3V which you can only get through OEM support. I have no guarantee and anyway it will take too long so after a while I found a guide how to tweak a 5V HDD to become a 3.3V. It was quite easy I replaced the 40GB HDD with a new Hitachi 160GB, broke the 2 pins as described in the guide and the Computer recognized the new drive :)

The only bad thing which I have to figure out now is how to clone the old HDD so that it also takes the hidden partition to the new disc. I tried with Acronis but the software could only see my normal partition. Anyway at the moment it is only important that my computer runs again and for cloning etc I got an external CD drive. So it is not that difficult to install an OS without that hidden partition.

Another good source for the R3-5 I also found on my quest.

January 21, 2007

LG wants to earn more money with “iPhone”

It seems like LG wants to earn more money with their KE850 which looks very similar to the iPhone so they put the name “Prada” on it. This results in expensive name= expensive phone. The name should sell the phone for about 600€! I personally would prefer the Apple one :) Have a look and compare:

iphone.jpg ke850_1.jpgprada_phone_fullsize.jpg

November 15, 2006

Burn baby Burn!! – See how batteries fire up your laptop

Impressive! I hope you will recall your battery soon ;)