Daily Archives: January 4, 2006

Why it took me hours to figure out to boot from DVD on my Toshiba M4

Tablet

Because I didn’t realize there was something really cool about this! I finally just happened upon it accidentally. One one of the times I rebooted, I noticed the pretty little icons for cds, thumb drives and more below the toshiba logo at startup. Pressing the left and right arrow keys highlighted the icons and voila I was able to boot from my selected device – CD.

Yah , I know – RTFM. I don’t happen to have it. But now that I knew what I was looking for, I was easily able to find it online.

From the manual,

“You can also manually choose the boot-up sequence by sliding the power switch, then quickly pressing the right or left arrow keys.”

Very cool feature!

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

HP Laserjet’s Java toolbox – icchy

Tools

My old HP Laserjet 4si had buttons on it that allowed you to control a lot of it’s settings. The new fangled printers do this through html based application that you install on your computer and it is driven by java. I didn’t mind that it was Java but it was definitely the source of many problems

After installing this for our new Laserjet 1320, I was having a number of odd problems on my computer. Lots of hanging, for example, when attempting to open an Word doc attached to an email. As soon as I killed the javaw.exe process, word opened right up.

It was also creating problems with some old foxpro 16bit software with the same symptoms. I would attempt to start up that software and it would do nothing, until I went into the task manager and ended the javaw.exe process again.

It was also a bit of a memory hog.

I finally uninstalled the HP toolbox software and hopefully I can do what I need through the WinXP drivers, although the toolbox does control a lot more stuff.

So far, things have been much better.

There is one other problem that is not HPs, but the fault of our Canon LiDe35 scanner who’s CanoScan software is incompatible with this printer (and according to tech support, others as well.) I am no longer able to use my scanner as a copier with output to the printer and have to scan to pdf’s then print the pdfs. Uggh. Canon said they are revising their software.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org