November 02, 2006

Technology- Laptop Driver Problems

In my last post I complained about debugging JavaScript in IE. I was totally wrong. Eric pointed me to a couple of sites and since then I found the "advanced options" to turn on debugger support. I feel pretty clueless to have been missing those for so long. There is also an IE "DevToolBar" that is a great help for inspecting the DOM, etc.

In the meantime I thought I'd complain about my laptop. I've got a Dell Inspiron E1505. I've mentioned it a few times before and I'm happy to report that the blue-screens are much less frequent. I do still get some sometimes- the main two causes seem to be wireless (which I now leave disabled whenever possible which pretty much sucks) and when I connect to the laptop with remote access which seems to bluescreen the video driver sometimes (and I've updated to the latest).

The other persistant problem is there appears to be something wrong with the drivers for the hard-disk. Whenever my hard-disk is active the system becomes very unresponsive. I really can't play music or video, at least locally without it glitching enough to make it miserable. When I watch with the Task Manager I see the kernel times (the red line you can turn on) appear very high anytime its busy using the disk (most of the CPU is busy in kernel, not user tasks). This seems wrong but I'm a bit at a loss about what to do about it. I've tried all the latest drivers off the Dell site, but if anyone has any suggestions, please email me.

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