READ IT IN DANSKE

9.13 – Anyone who has worked on a laptop before knows that there’s not a lot of room for error within the machines and that forces parts within reach after tons of screws have been removed. In the case of my new -ish HP Pavilion zv6000, a RAM memory upgrade that I expected to be simple provided quite a challenge! Click the image below for a HUGE version.

RadioShack and BrandSmart along with some other retail stores offered a deal that was too good to pass up. A laptop, printer and digital camera were bundled together for about $1,200.00. After recommending this a few times, I finally went for it. Best twelve hundred I ever spent (I’m typing that on the machine this very moment). Under powered, however with only 512MB RAM (maximum of 2GB).

“No problem to just go in through a few access hatches and install more RAM,” I thought. Two hours, twenty-seven screws and several bad words later, I discovered nothing but dead ends. Incredible. Internet research revealed a half-dozen other folks stumbling over the same confusion. The zv6000 takes two sticks of RAM but in two different spots. It’s the second spot that gets you!

As a public service to everyone else enjoying the baby workhorse that is HP’s Pavilion zv6000 models, we present an enhanced diagram right out of HP’s Manual. Keyboard removals beg cleanliness and organization of you.

Find the hard-to-find HP Pavilion zv6000 manual here in PDF.
If the link isn’t working one day, we’ve copied the manual here
One free PDF reader we love over Adobe’s Acrobat is Foxit which we have Setup v2.2 of here as an Executable – save it then run it.

UPDATE 30OCT07 – The zv6000 shipped with AMD Turion 64 Mobile MT-34 processors – the wrong RAM may result in sluggish performace due to mismatched speeds. So, even more helpful than ever, here’s what you need to know:

PC133 memory is used with Intel Pentium III processors.

Rambus memory, also called RDRAM, is used new Intel Pentium 4 processor with a 133 MHz external clock speed.

DDR (Double Data Rate ) SDRAM is used with AMD Athlon 1.2 GHz systems.

So, speifically, we can max out at 2GB of memory best of all if it’s PC2700 DDR-SDRAM Dual In-line Memory Module or DIMM. Proper prices for different MB of this memory type are $20 for 256 MB (why bother?), $40 for 512 MB and $80 for 1,024 MB or a Gig. These are not retail prices and don’t include shipping when ordered online. Your HP Pavilion zv6000 memory type would be twice as much retail and about 30 to 40% higher if you order through your friendly computer tech. 28NOV07 SOLVED!

9.04 – The great joke here is along the lines of ‘Evian’ water’s name. The first commercially available bottled water happened to be ‘naïve’ spelled backwards. A little cheeky but not offensive enough to stop its creators from claiming millions of consumer dollars. The latest version of Bluetooth technology introduces some fancy stuff like, “reducing the power consumption when devices are in the sniff low power mode,” and, “allowing role switches on an encrypted link.”

Only after the third revision do we hear what great pun Bluetooth’s creators enjoyed. Danish King, Harald Blåtand inadvertently loaned his initials to the Bluetooth logo. Where Blåtand negotiated between warring parties, Bluetooth negotiates between otherwise incompatible devices with no shared standard other than the Bluetooth standard. Harald Blåtand was remarkably advanced, eh? Hardly. Many sources put his birth in the year 911!

WIKI’s short description of Bluetooth’s origin along with several other sources state that “blue tooth” is a near translation to Blåtand. Our Danish/English dictionary confirms that, yes, ‘Blå’ is blue and ‘tand’ is tooth. So it’s not quite a stretch to imagine the look of this pre-Colgate grinning Rex. In the interest of teaching something other than trivia, here’s some standard information that regular Bluetooth users already know…

Bluetooth can best be described as a very smart, lightning quick card dealer (1,600 cards a second nominally) to whom you give the cards back. Each player at the table represents a different channel and the game itself in the network or ad hoc environment for a user. No matter if it’s a mouse, an ear piece for a phone or a laser emitted keyboard for the PDA, each packet (or card in the game) is sent and returned and the channel (or player in the game) is instantly changed reducing interference greatly.

What kind of information being sent in packets doesn’t matter. The signal is strong and fast and come in low-power and medium power modes changing to cover differing physical conditions (small room, big room, house). The frequency range in which Bluetooth chitters and chatters and ‘deals out cards’ is open and available the World over ensuring an ear piece to work in Hong Kong as well as Miami, Florida. Microchips of assigned devices are immediately recognized on set-up.

Bluetooth is about being productive without wires. The Bluetooth site should well be considered the, “Bluetooth Classroom” of choice. With Bluetooth Version 2 transferring at 3 Megabytes per second, it’s a solid choice for smaller productivity environments like printing from the PDA and using the phone hands-free in newer cars. With over 500 million units at the end of 2005, old Harald Blåtand is somewhere smiling pretty.