CERN chooses Hewlett-Packard for networking

According to Business Wire,

HP Boosts Performance of CERN Network

Products and services of Hewlett-Packard were chosen by the CERN network team to deal, among other things, with the 15 million gigabytes of data that the LHC needs to share, store, and analyze every year.




That's more data than what could be stored on the whole hard disk of my ancient HP Pavilion ze4125 laptop ;-) which I still keep alive but no longer use too often.

It seems that the network will primarily use the new IPv6 protocol for IP addresses.

Mam Barbara Boxer worked so hard to get the title

The U.S. military has called civilians "Sirs" and "Madams" for centuries. And indeed, in 2009, the male senators were called "Sirs" and everything was fine.

But Mam Barbara Boxer decided that she had worked so hard to become the "Senator" that the military personnel had to change the tradition:

Call Me Senator from RightChange on Vimeo.

The driver of Ms Boxer's work has been her title and she is overworked. Now, Ms Carly Fiorina - the ex-boss of Hewlett Packard - has a chance to allow Mam Barbara Boxer to relax once again.




The original video with Boxer is here.

Via Bob Ferguson

Dr Faust confirmed

As expected, Dr Faust was confirmed as the 28th president of Harvard University. The choice increases the diversity of the presidents in many respects, see Pug Bus. Faust said:

• I hope that my own appointment can be one symbol of an opening of opportunities that would have been inconceivable even a generation ago. [But] I'm not the woman president of Harvard, I'm the president of Harvard.
  

Well, I am somewhat less certain about the last sentence. At any rate, she's the fifth president in a row who is not a scientist and she is much further from science than her permanent predecessor.

I find this happiness about the femaleness of a president insane. It works very differently in the commercial world. Despite being attractive and interesting, the last Dow Jones female CEO was fired exactly two years ago.

How has Hewlett-Packard been doing since February 2005? Well, you can see February 2005 in the graph below. It's the moment when the linear growth of the stock price from $20 to $42 started. ;-) The earnings quadrupled between Q4 2005 and Q4 2006. Four days ago, Standard & Poor have upgraded Hewlett-Packard Inc. from "A-" to "A". All my computers in the last 10 years were Hewlett-Packard, so congratulations!



Fortunately for all of us, there is no analogous way how to draw similar graphs describing universities which is why all people in the Academia may uncritically celebrate that most of the Ivy League presidents will be female. It's just great, by definition. ;-)

Fixing the keyboard of HP laptops

Service manual for HP pavilion laptops (11.2 MB) - click here
Manual for ze4900, Compaq nx9020, nx9030, nx9040, Presario 2200
Manual for other models such as ze4700
Options to buy HP laptop keyboards - click here
Discussion forum with links to many other HP manuals

Repairing the keyboards of Hewlett-Packard laptops

Problem:

Suddenly it may happen that a group of keys on your Pavilion laptop (the most typical example is "G", "H", "Backspace", "apostrophe", and "F4") becomes intermittently insensitive. In some cases the problem only occurs when the notebook has been turned on for 10 minutes.

Explanation:

The Foxconn keyboard connector is poorly designed. As your computer is being used, it heats up and various materials in the connector expand at different rates. Consequently, the connector is moving. It becomes loose and after two months or so, some contacts are lost. Sometimes the problem can be solved temporarily if we apply mechanical pressure in the center-left region of the bottom side of the laptop.

A thrifty solution - reseating the connector:

Reseating the connector fixes the problem. Sometimes the problem returns after a couple of months; usually it is solved permanently. Don't be afraid to follow these instructions, HP laptop keyboard replacement with these step by step instructions is not difficult. A screwdriver is recommended but as you can see on the pictures, a pocket knife will do the job, too.

• 1. Shut down the computer, unplug the AC adapter, and remove the battery.
• 2. Close the display, and from the rear of the computer remove the two Phillips screws from the back of the plastic hinge covers. (zv series owners need to remove 4 screws on the hinge covers.)

Screw: left	Screw: right
Click the photograph to zoom in!

• 3. Lean the display backward as far as possible, so that it is out of the way.
  
  CAUTION: Do not touch metal surfaces inside the computer until they have cooled off, especially if the computer has just been running.
  
  
• 3a (only for zv series or Compaq Presario owners). Now you need to remove the four long screws beneath the computer that run into the bottom of the plastic cover in #4. Failure to do so will result in a broken cover.
• 4. Carefully pry up the plastic cover above the keyboard at the hinges, using a flathead screwdriver, and remove it. Don't be too scared that you will break it trying to pry it off... It will pop off OK.
• 5. Unscrew the four Phillips screws at the top of the keyboard. (They remain attached to the keyboard.)

Philips Screw 1	Philips Screw 2
Philips Screw 3	Philips Screw 4
Click an image to zoom in!

• 6. Slide the keyboard backward to detach it, then tilt it forward and turn it upside down.
• 7. Carefully remove the keyboard connector from the motherboard. The motherboard is the part of the computer with the chips which will be exposed once the keyboard is removed. The connector looks like a film which is stuck to the keyboard and which extends into the motherboard. Carefully remove the end of the connector by loosening the plastic rectangle which is stuck into a slot in the motherboard; see the figure on the right.

This is the interior of an HP Pavilion N5425. In this photo, the flat silver-colored piece is the keyboard flipped upside down. Click the picture to zoom it in. Thanks to Jennifer Crook. A related picture of an IBM laptop.

• 8. Make sure that the end of the connector is clean and dry. Replace the connector by pressing it back into the motherboard evenly and firmly, making sure it is in place tightly. Doing so will fully restore the connection between the motherboard and the keyboard.
• 9. Tilt the keyboard back, slide the flanges on the front edge forward into the slots, and fasten the keyboard with the four attached Phillips screws at the top.
• 10. Replace the plastic cover that is above the keyboard, front edge first.
• 11. Hold both hinge covers and snap the plastic cover in place. If necessary, push downward at each end of the cover to secure it.
• 12. Close the display and replace the two screws at the rear of the hinge covers.
• 13. Insert the battery, connect the AC adapter, and press the reset button.

When the system boots up the keyboard problem will be solved, guaranteed, at least for 2 or 3 months, most likely for good.

Relevant models: 1500US , 1501CL , 1505US , 1507EA-XP , 1510US , 1515 , 1516US , 1520US , 1525US , 17XL375 , 2100US , 2101US , 2102US , 2105US , 2110US , 2117EA , 2118EA , 2120EA , 2120LA , 2125LA , 2130EA , 2130LA , 2134EA , 2135US , 2140CA , 2140US , 2141EA , 2144EA , 2145CA , 2145US , 2150LA , 2155US , 2158EA , 2161US , 2162US , 2170CA , 2170US , 2171US , 2172US , 2173EA , 2175CA , 2175US , 2178CL , 2180CA , 2182US , 2186RS , 2190US , 2195CA , 2195US , 2199US , 2585US , 2801CL , 2810 , 2815 , 2817 , 2818 , 2822 , 2825 , 4100 , 4150 , 500 , 510 , 6000 , 6100 , 700US , 700Z , 701CL , 721AP , 722US , 730LA , 730US , 731AP , 732 , 732US , 733 , 735LA , 736 , 800CT , 900 , 900US , 902 , 905US , 906US , 907 , 910US , 915 , 915US , 920 , 920US , HA-Fabric Manager OmniBook Server , M700 , N1000 , N1000c , N1000v , N1000v with iPAQ H3850 , N1005v , N1015v , N1015v with iPAQ Pocket PC H1910 , N1020v , N1020v with iPAQ Pocket PC H1910 , N1050v , N110 , N115 , N160 , N160 with HP iPAQ H3850 , N3150 , N3250 , N3270 , N3290 , N3295 , N3310 , N3330 , N3350 , N3370 , N3390 , N3410 , N400 , N400c , N410c , N410c with iPAQ H3850 , N410c with iPAQ Pocket PC H1910 , N5130 , N5135 , N5170 , N5190 , N5195 , N5210 , N5240 , N5250 , N5310 , N5311L , N5340 , N5350 , N5351 , N5412l , N5415 , N5420L , N5421 , N5422L , N5425 , N5430 , N5435 , N5442 , N5452 , N5462 , N5475 , N600c , N600c with iPAQ H3850 , N610c , N610c with iPAQ H3850 , N610c with iPAQ Pocket PC H1910 , N620c , N6395 , N800c , N800c with iPAQ Pocket PC H1910 , N800v , N800v with iPAQ Pocket PC H1910 , N800w , Nc4000 , Nc4010 , Nc6000 , nx9000 , nx9005 , nx9008 , Nx9010 , Nx9010 Administrative Image , Nx9010 Student Image , Nx9020 , Nx9030 , SOJOURN , vt6200 , XE , XE2 , XE3 , XE3L , xe4100 , xe4400s , xe4500 , xe4500s , Xf125 , xf145 , xf255 , Xf328 , xf335 , Xh365 , Xh535 , XT1000 , Xt155 , XT6050 , xt6200 , ze1110 , ze1115 , ze1201 , ze1210 , ze1230 , ze1250 , ze4100 , ze4101 , ze4102 , ze4111s , ze4115 , ze4120s , ze4125 , ze4130 , ze4145 , ze4208s , ze4209 , ze4210 , ze4219 , ze4220 , ze4230 , ze4232s , ze4234s , ze4282s , ze4315us , ze4325us , ze4345 , Ze4347EA , ze4365us , Ze4367EA , ze4401us , ze4402us , ze4404EA , ze4420us , ze4430us , Ze4501us , Ze4502us , ze4510OM , ze4525US , Ze4540CA , ze4540us , Ze4545us , Ze4546SR , Ze4547wm , ze4560us , Ze4600 , Ze4601us , Ze4610us , Ze4630US , Ze4805us , ze5185 , ze5365us , ze5417LA , ze5427LA , ze5447LA , Ze5497LA , Ze5547wm , Ze5568cl , Ze5580US , Ze5637LA , zt1121s , zt1122s , zt1130 , zt1131s , zt1135 , zt1141 , zt1151s , zt1152 , zt1155 , zt1162 , zt1171 , Zt1271 , zu1155 , zu1175



Modification of the procedure for the notebooks such as N3270

I skipped Step #2 and Step #3 on your procedure list, because the N3270 hinges are disconnected from the plastic cover, so when I do step #4, I just pry up the plastic cover above the keyboard at itself (there are no screws) instead of at the hinges. Step #5 and further are the same on my model. ... Aaron Shen

A few changes that some people with the HP Pavilion ZT1000 series laptops should know:

1. The screws on the back of the LCD panel are covered by black rubber "stickers". They can peel those off with a knife or screwdriver, to see the screws.

2. There are only 3 screws, not 4, to take the keyboard off. Justin

Other computers

Compaq Presario, Acer Ferrari, Omnibook, Flash

Hewlett-Packard: two-story chips

Moore's law has been stagnant lately. Hewlett-Packard's applied physicists in Palo Alto may return the industry back on track. Tom Abate in

• San Francisco Chronicle

has an entertaining explanation. Chips need to become smaller if you want to speed them up. The transistors inside the chips are like buildings in a city. However, the wires that connect them play the role of the streets. The streets waste a lot of space that could be used for real estate.



The Hewlett-Packard solution is to build the streets above the buildings, not below them. Moreover, it is just the streets that appear in the first floor above the building: the perpendicular avenues are placed in another layer two stories above the buildings. ;-) There is an insulating (or "insulting", as a classic wrote) soap-like layer in between the streets and avenues that can become conductive if you apply some voltage to the avenues. The same voltage applied to the streets turns the switch off, they strangely say. Both streets and avenues are only a few atoms thick.

The immediate way to use this technology as early as in 2007 are FPGAs, modern reprogrammable chips. It is not clear whether the breakthrough may be useful for the conventional architecture of microprocessors and memory chips.

Generic Host Process for Win32 Services

The process svchost.exe is doing many kinds of tasks and consequently, there can also be many sources of the error. You have to investigate a bit...

Update from February-March 2007: First, try to follow the instructions at Microsoft KB 931852 related to Windows Update and the Catroot2 folder. If it doesn't fix your problem, try the following recipes, too.

Update from January 2007: Start/Run the command called regedit.exe (Registry editor). Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\
CurrentControlSet\Services\NetBT\Parameters and on the right side, double-click TransportBindName - press delete and give it an empty value. That will close port 445. Also, go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\OLE and change the value of EnableDCOM from Y to the value N - that will close port 135. If you know how, you may also disable NETbios. Restart the computer and the bug might be gone.

Update: the most efficient way to fix the error in most cases is to install the update offered on this Microsoft page even though this page doesn't explicitly mention the error: choose the update for your correct operating system. It works for 50% of users. Are you among them? Let us know by clicking "fast comments" at the end of the article.



Another hope: Also, 25% of the users can fix the bug by: turning off automatic updates in the Control Panel; going to update.microsoft.com; manually installing the updates there; rebooting. You can turn on the automatic updates again and pray.

If it doesn't fix the problem but you think you have a problem with svchost.exe and Windows Update - e.g. you're getting an access violation error and/or svchost.exe eats 100% of your CPU time - install KB 927891, to be released as a standard update in May or June 2007. If you add this patch, you should also manually update to the update client WSUS 3.0 and pray.

Original text from 2006:




Everyone who has recently encountered the Windows XP error

• Generic Host Process for Win32 Services has encountered a problem and needs to close

should know that this problem with svchost.exe (an executable file that is started to run all kinds of processes that depend on dynamically linked libraries) went away as soon as I updated the drivers for the Hewlett-Packard printers and scanners.

Update May 2007: If your generic host process error is related to Hewlett-Packard drivers, a solution is also explained in KB 821690.

You may find the executable file to update the drivers somewhere in

• C:\Program Files\HP\ ...

or HP may be replaced by Hewlett-Packard. The subdirectory normally has "update" in it, and you should find and run an EXE file that connects you to the Internet and updates all the drivers automatically. Alternatively, you may try to search for the drivers for your HP device on the Hewlett-Packard website.



In fact, later I found out that I discovered a wheel: Microsoft agrees that the old or expired HP drivers are responsible for the bug. A Hewlett-Packard page offers a more complicated explanation that you will hopefully avoid. It is likely that the microscopic reason of the bug is that the HP drivers incorrectly interact with the firewall.

A new broadband-spread worm - worm.mocbot.a

The major broadband ADSL operators recently had to increase the security because of a worm in Shanghai but believe me that you are probably not infected. If you are, see this Microsoft page.

Update: The update that you may install from the page under the link "Microsoft page" in the previous sentence removes the "generic host process" error in 50 percent of cases/users regardless whether you're infected by a worm or not.

If you're sure that you don't have such a problematic HP software, try to look for other similar programs that might try to be contacting their companies and be killed by the firewall. If the problem appeared suddenly, we are probably talking about your provider's firewall. If you did something yourself, turning your firewall off could also circumvent the problem.

An alternative reason

In the past, the same error was also caused by another problem whose fix is described on another Microsoft page, KB 894391, but it is likely that most people already have installed these hotfixes. But if you have encountered this error message since you installed Windows XP SP2, the Microsoft page will almost certainly apply to you.

See also XP Service Pack 3 final build.

Prof Schwinger repairs Hewlett-Packard laptops

This text is not important but it is somewhat entertaining.

The Brazilian server Fórum PCs has an interesting article that describes an omnipresent laptop keyboard timebomb of Hewlett-Packard notebooks (English translation). The punch line of the article is a "magic URL" to a very efficient guide written by Prof. Schwinger of Harvard University that tells you what is the reason of the problem and how to fix it.

The Brazilian computer enthusiast includes two photographs in his article. Both of them are exactly identical and both of them show that Prof. Schwinger has exactly the same model of a notebook, knife, scissors, and digital camera as your humble correspondent. ;-) The Brazilian source reveals that Julian Schwinger offers a better computer support than HP itself even 12 years after his death.

Scientific calculator: flash

If you can't find your calculator, this Flash calculator may sometimes be helpful. You may prefer another calculator by Hewlett-Packard. The previous Flash posting was probably Manic Miner (be ready for noise!). If you're a kid who wants to play with the destructive force of gravity, try bloxforever (1 MB).

Last female Dow Jones CEO fired

Many people focus on the percentage of women among the new tenured professors, which slipped below 15 percent, but no one cares about the world of business too much. Sheila Lennon explained in her article - published in many sources that require subscription - that the following story is not a feminist issue because its hero may be female, but she is also a greedy capitalist.

The Dow Jones industrial index is composed of 30 companies. Carly Fiorina has been the CEO of Hewlett-Packard for a couple of years - since 1999. She's a rather impressive person - she holds a bachelor's degree in medieval history and philosophy from Stanford, a MSc. degree from MIT, and an MBA from Maryland. She has been working for Cisco, Kellogg, Merck, Lucent, and AT & T.

Because she was just fired and replaced by Robert Wayman as interim CEO, all 30 Dow Jones companies have currently male CEOs.

• CNN: Fiorina fired

All the computers I've bought in the last 10 years were Hewlett-Packard products - a desktop and laptops - which makes these developments a bit interesting for me. The main decision that Fiorina has been criticized for was her purchase of Compaq in 2002 that failed to increase the profits.

Once Fiorina is ousted, the HP's stock soars: the price immediately jumped by 11 percent as the investors celebrate that the woman is gone. I would be skeptical about such reactions. Although some of her "social" inclinations are not exactly my cup of tea, in my opinion, Fiorina has been still a kind of hero - and the first or the second most influential woman in business (perhaps after the eBay CEO). You can't expect miracles - just compare the HP's performance with the most obvious competition. Compaq has been bought by another company; IBM had to sell its legendary PC production to the Chinese Lenovo; and Dell continues to do well. The Lenovo deal may sound exciting, but it still seems as a success of the Chinese, not a success of the managers of IBM.

I don't think that HP is gonna do much better without Fiorina. And let me admit that even if it will, I may continue to think that it's because of the acts by Fiorina that improved the situation of HP and its abilities to deal with the competition. In my opinion, the HP shareholders have nothing to celebrate today. The company has considered a split many times, and Wayman has been an opponent of the merger with Compaq. We may expect some fragmentation now, and I am not sure whether it will be a positive development for HP.

OK, finally: even if the investors are right and getting rid of this brave woman is a reason to increase the price of the stock by 11 percent, let me say that I think that it will be much less fun!

At any rate, you should not waste with your compassion about Carly Fiorina! Because HP does not want her to be starving and dying of hunger, they will give her 21 million USD to say good-bye. ;-) Update: 45 million!

Crossbar latch & fast computers

This looks like an impressive discovery in nanophysics. Today, Hewlett-Packard has announced in Journal of Applied Physics

• Kuekes, Stewart, Williams article

that they invented a "crossbar latch", a new cheap, nanometer-sized component at the molecular level that has the potential to replace the transistors and speed up the computers by three orders of magnitude.

• USA today about HP
• CNN about HP

The patent was actually registered already in 2003:

• Crossbar latch patent

It will probably take years before the new computers can be developed using this technology, if it ever happens.




See also Hewlett-Packard's memristors good for memory chips.

Hewlett-Packard keyboards & PayPal

HP laptop keyboard: main instructions how to repair it

This short note is only gonna be interesting for a small percentage of the readers, and I apologize to the rest.

The issue is that most types of laptops from Hewlett-Packard suffer from a minor bug: a group of keys often becomes intermittently insensitive. In some cases the problem only occurs when the notebook has been turned on for 10 minutes.

My laptop (ZE 4125), bought at ubid.com, suffered from this problem as well. After some time, I was able to figure out that the problem was caused by the Foxconn connector, and reseating it had fixed the problem. The laptop has been operating perfectly for at least 18 months.

The most typical symptom of the connector problem is that the keys G,H,backspace,apostrophe,F4 do not respond.

Because I found the replacement rather subtle - especially the question which screws should be removed, and so forth - I've created the following web page with some photographs

http://www.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~motl/hp-keyboard/index-classical.html

Dan Arzhanov later converted this page into an entertaining shockwave applet

http://www.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~motl/hp-keyboard/
Jennifer Crook sent me another photograph, and I am also grateful to several other people that offered their help in improving the page. It seems that the page has been useful to many people who have sent their reactions.




Another rather new feature of these web pages is the possibility to

Of course that almost no one does so, but I recently received the first payment - a couple of dollars - which is a lot of fun. Paypal.com works.