Here's My Story

(continuted from here ) ...it took me 2 hours 24 mins to get home 🤯The usual peak period traffic was worsen by the heavy rain. About 70 mins into the ride, I was informed (via phone call) that the motherboard had been repaired but it seems that my RAM was also damaged and they would show me later. Meanwhile, I texted Ban to ask his help to cook rice and boil a couple of eggs. He then had two near-accidents: One at the carpark of a mall: nearly hit a car. The other was at home: the lid of the pot that he used to cook the eggs exploded but fortunately none of the glass pieces hurt him. I was so relieved that he wasn't hurt in either case. Gave him a hug when I knew this. Didn't matter much that the rice was undercooked because he forgot to add enough water. Poor Ban. I prepared the salad first so that we both could start with that first while I prepare the salmon don and eggs. We then finished our dinner at our usual pace while regaling each other about our respective woes. As e...

When I purchased  ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14  slightly more than 3 years ago, I almost immediately paid for extended warranty with premium service. Thus the warranty was extended from 2 years to 3 years. Yet, my laptop needed repair about a month after the warranty expired 😑 I was playing Immortals of Aveum demo. I wanted to check something on the web and so I alt-tabbed. Then bam! Monitor went blank but keyboard lights were still on. There was no sound too. I just did what I usually do: tried force shutdown it by holding down the power button. It took longer than usual to shutdown i.e. about 15 counts but it immediate started back up. It didn't fix the issue though: monitor was still blank with no sound of Windows starting. Later I discovered that if I unplugged the power cable, I could stop the auto restart after force shutdown it. However, the issue remained. So I decided to bring it to the nearest ASUS service centre i.e. Serveall Low Yat at Plaza Low Yat. Took Grab because Ba...

My ASUS laptop is working well so far. Only once I needed to force shut it because Twitch in Firefox did something funny that caused the screen to go blank. There was a hiccup right at the start: I noticed that the ping in my Paladins games fluctuated frequently and widely. Some people said that, for some reasons, the TaskFirst - Games option caused it, which is ironic because TaskFirst is supposed to "prioritize your internet connection's available bandwitch to particular activities for the smoothest possible performance" and for the particular activity Games it's supposed to "prioritize game-related tasks, such as gameplay and game live streaming."  I was skeptical about this fix but tried it anyway, due to lack of other options. It actually worked. Ironic.

One day, I noticed that my Paladins game was sluggish and that I wasn't able to record it using GeForce Experience. So once that was done, I went to check the application and noticed that its recording feature, Shadowplay, was greyed out and stated that I didn't have an external graphicas card. Eh? Check on Device Manager showed that it was hidden! I tried many things, including system restore, but they didn't work. The final action I took was to uninstall it but it didn't reinstall when I restarted my laptop. In fact, it wasn't even hidden 😬 I wanted to send to Yus for repair but that would be crossing interstate border, which was still banned and so instead I planned to bring it to OK Computer Solution Petaling Jaya the next day. However, later there was a greater problem: BSOD, with the error message "Bad System Config Info error". It happened 3 times within a short period, the last of with somehow the system got me to a troubleshooting option which a...

Many years ago, probably close to a decade, after trying out a few mouses, I finally found a cheap mouse that's comfortable for me: Logitech M100r. This model became my go-to replacement and the last one lasted for about 4 years before its left click became erratic: it either double clicked (although I pressed it only once) or it didn't respond at all. As usual, I right away searching for Logitech M100r on Shopee. This happened shortly after I researched and purchased the RK 71 keyboard and that got me thinking maybe I should buy a better quality mouse, one that can also help improve my gaming experience. To my shock, a good mouse cost almost as much as a good keyboard. As with the keyboard, the research on mouse also took many hours but fortunately not as long. In the end I settled on Razer Viper Mini. It so happened that there was incoming 8.8 sale on Shopee and I got about RM 5 discount hahaha. But the good thing was that it was from Razer official store itself and had 2-we...

(expanding on this ) The keyboard I bought was Fantech Fighter II K613: Actually, before this, I bought a cheaper smaller keyboard, just to see whether I can make do with such a cheap keyboard. Problem with it was that the spacebar slowly became stiff i.e. it got harder to press it. So I bought the above keyboard at a computer shop, upon the staff's recommendation after my complaint about the previous keyboard. This keyboard has warranty of a year. Sadly, not even close to a year (think it was like 4 months), its USB connection became unstable: it could suddenly stopped working. Switching USB ports didn't solve the problem. The shop gave me a new one as replacement. The new one worked for almost 6 months before the same problem occured. This time, not only did I tried a different port on my laptop but I also used ports on a USB hub and ports on Ban's laptop. Well, at least we managed to confirm that it was the keyboard's problem. I started researching on the internet fo...

Few months ago, my adapter finally died. Ok, to be exact, the wire died. The part where it was connected to the adapter was exposed like years ago (?) and was duct-taped. Yes, that band-aid worked for years. When I ordered a new adapter, the old one was still working but needed to be placed oddly e.g. against a chair's leg and the connecting part was pressed on with books, and the position had to be changed occassionally. The problem was that it was a little difficult, for a non-tech person, to ascertain the correct adapater online. Also, many of them were shipped from overseas and the shipping time was aggravated by MCO too. So, to my pleasant surprise, instead of the stated minimum 30-day shipping time, I got this:

One day, my IRST (Intel Rapid Storage Technology) needed my attention: For the above and many refences obtained via a web search, it was highly likely that my hard disk was dying, especially since this event kept popping up everyday. This was the result shown by Crystal DiskInfo. Not good. The final nail in the diagnosis. So I had no choice but to replace the hard disk. I could have waited until it kaput completely but it might happen at an inconvenient time and also I don't like unplanned events. Although my laptop is already out of warranty, I was willing to pay Dell technician to solve this issue. Unfortunately, they no longer stocked such hard disk.They suggested that I shopped locally for an SSD compatible with my laptop. On hindsight, this doesn't make sense because WDC WD7500BPKX-75HPJT0 is a SATA hard disk, not a SSD. This sort of caused me problem later on. At Digital Mall, at the first shop I ventured in, I was dismayed to learn...

Since the last repair by Dell engineer, I've waited for Dell sales team to e-mail me quotation of the battery. And waited. And waited  @@ There was simply no response from the sales team, in spite of numerous queries sent to their customer service officers via e-mail, phone and Facebook. I pointed out to them that this is making a mockery of the motto automatically inserted at the end of their e-mail: "At Dell we strive to exceed expectations and provide the highest levels of service to customers." This nonsense went on for about 2 months before I finally receive a quotation from the sales team. No apologies whatsoever though, unlike their customer service officers. Humph. It's been about a week now using the new battery. I have tried a few times unplugging and plugging back the adapter. Seems like the issue "plugged in, not charging" is gone. Phew, finally!

Recently, every now and then, I was disconnected from Atlas Reactor server mid-game and couldn't reconnect due to "network error". Resetting modem and router, as well as restarting laptop, couldn't solve the issue. Finally, I found a temporary workaround (obtained from here ): Running Command prompt as administrator, Type "netsh winsock reset" and press "Enter". Type "netsh int ip reset" and press "Enter". Type "ipconfig /release" and press "Enter". Type "ipconfig /renew" and press "Enter". Type "ipconfig /flushdns" and press "Enter". It fixed it for many hours but the problem came back again. I don't know what else to do but just to hope it'll go away on its own.

(11) Thought of system restore but had error "System Restore error 0x80070091". Searched online and tried  this solution  but the last step was unsuccessful because the file already existed. (12) Meanwhile, rolled back audio driver and the headphone jack always works now! (13) Re (11) above, just renamed slightly different (added "2" just after "old"). System restore worked but didn't solve the low muffled audio problem. (14) New problem: when I played Faeria, Overwatch and Atlas Reactor, at least one of these happened: (a) flickering (b) discolouration (c) patches of monocolours (d) entire screen filled with coloured lines of varying width Strangely, these didn't happen to Paladins, Small World 2, Guild Wars 2 and Crusader Kings 2. Was advised by Dell to choose "on" for vertical sync setting in NVIDIA control panel (although I would think the default "use the 3D application setting" is better) and to use the given ...

(1) From 100% to 40+%, then slowly increased to 53% before plummeted to 3%! Now back to 6%. (2) Bios: battery operating normally. Dell Support Assist: passed batter test. (3) Used Ban's laptop adapter. No change. (4) Dell engineer: changed motherboard and the power input jack. (5) Dell engineer: changed motherboard and power adapter. Advised to get new battery but he would ask Dell to refund me if that doesn't solve it. (6) Meanwhile, discovered sound is too low and muffled, similar to previous incident . Informed CSO of this and (5) above. (7) Then discovered my laptop was performing like a tortoise, similar to what I experienced before . Checked IRST: disk wasn't accelerated. Accelerated it. Still started slow and programme started slow initially but subsequent usage was normal. Saw the RAID cache volume's cache mode is off. Don't know that's normal. Tried to find out but no success. In the end, updated driver of the SATA RAID Controller and it wor...

One day, my laptop inexplicably had BSOD (blue screen of death). Unfortunately, by now I have forgotten what the error code was @@. Later, when I wanted to record a gameplay with GeForce Experience, I was told that a NVIDIA graphics card was needed. I was confused, of course, because my laptop has it! So I brought up Device Manager and there was no NVIDIA card among the display adapters! What's going on @@ So I performed a stress test using Dell's Support Assist and, as expected, everything was ok. Using their website, I was told all drivers were up to date. I tried this and this set of steps that worked for others but not for me. In fact, the BIOS could not detect any discrete graphics card. I thought maybe the graphics card had loosen and so just needed to be pushed back in. Unfortunately, I learned that for Alienware 14, it is soldered onto the motherboard @@. I had no choice but to ask Dell for help via e-mail. However, I can't remember how or why, I dec...