Steve Caldwell’s Weblog

Here is a helpful blog post I found on how to add Google site search to your Chrome browser.

Oddly enough, the fact that a Dell Inspiron 1420 has a default bios setting that keeps the battery-powered screen very dim is held against it in reviews. This is just a factory setting that you can change. Changing it greatly improved my satisfaction with my new laptop.

Thanks to the poster who explained how to do it:

I just purchased 1420 on 12/7/08 and had the same problem with screen brightness when power unplugged, as mention in earlier post. Since I have other Dell laptops , I knew this was uncommon. The fix I found was adjusting the video brightness in the BIOS at boot-up. To do this: Press and hold F2 while pressing “power on” button. You will see Bios blue screen with “systems info”. Use arrow down key till you get to” video”, then press “enter”. Arrow down again to “brightness” (without AC). My 1420 was set at 3. I adjusted with arrow key to maximum of 10. Then press “enter”. Read instructions at bottom of screen and “press Esc to exit setup”. Then arrow to “exit” (is highlighted in green) and press enter. This solved my problem with screen staying dimmed when unplugged. I should also say that you can still modify screen birghtness in battery mode , by adjusting the display brightness in the “power settings”. You should not have to go back into the BIOS again. Hope this helps.

From:

http://en.community.dell.com/forums/t/19234321.aspx?PageIndex=2

For no good reason, I have been playing around with Ubuntu Linux lately. I have setup my Dell Inspiron 600m as a dual-boot Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux machine. I am currently running the Dapper Drake distribution of Ubuntu Linux.

The behavior of my laptop’s touchpad made using linux very frustrating. I spent several hours today trying to disable the tapping feature (tap-to-click) of my touchpad until I finally found this thread which provides excellent instructions on how to fix the touchpad. Follow William Szostak’s 2nd posting.

Public Function cut_and_paste(strObject As String, strCut As String, strPaste As String) As String
‘strObject is the base string
‘strCut is the string being cut out of strObject
‘strPaste is the string replacing all instances of strCut

Dim strFINAL As String

If InStr(strObject, strCut) > 0 Then
strFINAL = Mid(strObject, 1, InStr(strObject, strCut) – 1) & _
strPaste & cut_and_paste(Mid(strObject, InStr(strObject, strCut) + Len(strCut)), strCut, strPaste)
Else
strFINAL = strObject
End If

cut_and_paste = strFINAL

End Function

I recently spent many hours vainly searching online tech groups for code related to socket programming in Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) so that I could easily write VBA to enable tools developed in MS Excel or Access to “surf the web” to download data etc. Finally, I found the following utility:

http://www.ostrosoft.com/oswinsck.asp#inst

This code, when pasted into your ‘This Worksheet’ object in the MS Excel VBA editor, for example, gets the raw html from a specified URL. NB – to run this example you may need to add a reference to the OSWINSCKdll file in the VBA editor.

This Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) module includes code I borrowed and adapted to automate the compression of files using either WinZip (registered version ONLY) or Windows XP’s built-in file compression utility.