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!

9.12 – It seems that more computers are just shutting off for no reason at all this season. A second problem is the Internet Explorer on Windows XP locking up/freezing and then generating an error report when closed. Of all the most horrible computer problems in the Universe, these are two of the top three. For fear of causing a total landslide of jinx problems, we won’t tell you what the third most horrible problem is!

Let’s get to work. Windows XP is inviting itself on to Microsoft servers despite a fast or slow Internet connection. We’ve already seen evidence that XP is updating regardless of you having given it permission or not; nagging is triple-fold if you are running XP Service Pack 1 (10OCT06 final support day). Although Microsoft can deny it at the consumer level, computers update with little ‘hotfixes’ here and there for almost every visit to the maker’s servers.


The most infamous Hotfix bungle for us is the .NET Framework Hotfix for version 1.1 Computers that downloaded this Framework 1.1 fix later refused to Shutdown from the Start Menu forcing users to press and hold the power button on their PC’s. Uninstalling the .NET Framework 1.1 Hotfix through the Add/Remove Programs corrected this goof. Now, .NET Framework is at version 2.0.

With programming as convoluted at Windows, it’s no wonder that one thing breaks when another is fixed. If you have ever touched a carburetor for an old car, you know the experience. If Windows XP is just stopping dead and shutting off the computer, you might be in luck. One Toshiba Satellite laptop we tooled with only required a serious dusting off. The heat stored by dust captured on the main board was tripping the safety features and shutting the laptop down to avoid overheating.

The same goes for PC Desktops in houses with open windows, cats, smokers, lots of carpet, etc. The heat from the mother board can bake fine dust particles to itself. This adds up until dust is so caked on that the heat cannot escape. A temperature reading by the mother board reveals overheating and it trips the power off command. Removing this caked on crud is as easy as a can of old VCR ‘duster.’ Be prepared for a storm of nasty junk though.


If dusting your system doesn’t stop the shut down problem, you may have serious operating system problems that are best solved by a complete reformat. A shutdown can occur when Windows encounters a string of commands that make no sense to its programming. Perhaps a poorly written code is trying to write to a part of the hard drive that is inaccessible; maybe a bit of the hard drive that stored crucial data is now corrupt and, with no second choice, Windows generates a fatal system error.

If your system error results in the Blue Screen of Death, have a second party (like a smart friend, or Dinarius) copy data from your hard drive and just reformat the whole thing. Bad sectors of the hard drive will be ignored and you can return the copy of your data and reinstall the software you prefer. Thankfully, newer computers have the operating system disks built right in. There may be some [F#] key to press on starting the machine that will perform various scans and fixes right then and there within three hours or so.

If Internet Explorer is freezing and generating errors on exiting, you are well-advised to make back-ups of your valuable data as soon as possible. Internet Explorer (until the next version) is tied in too tightly with the Operating System according to critics. One can’t perform at 100% without the other. This was a fun-filled scam echoing from the days of multiple anti-trust lawsuits claiming that Microsoft was pushing out competition by enforcing a ‘monoculture’ environment of software.

Since Windows 95, it’s been true that Microsoft stuff works best with Microsoft stuff; it also holds true that nothing breaks Microsoft stuff faster than Microsoft stuff.