Fixed my broken Jack LaLanne Power Juicer!

So I recently bought a second-hand Jack LaLanne Power Juicer on eBay, in an effort to get more fruit and veg into my diet. It is an incredible machine, very quiet and can juice pretty much anything. So, as you might imagine, I was juicing everything I could get my hands on.

Until recently, when it mysteriously stopped working after being washed by my partner. The damn thing simply stopped turning on, as if the motor was busted. I tried changing the fuse, refitting all the units, cheating the safety switch, you name it. You have never experienced withdrawal symptoms like going cold turkey on fresh juice.

Fortunately, after feelings of nostalgia triggered by a video of lighters in a blender, I finally found someone with the exact same problem on FixYa.

Turns out that if you remove the pulp cup incorrectly, a bit of plastic breaks off that triggers a VERY hard-to-see safety switch! I fixed it with a toothpick temporarily, and then promptly juiced every fruit I could find in the house and guzzled it.

Just wait ’til I hit the fruit market tomorrow.

Corrupted nVidia driver download problem

So, another strange problem when installing Windows 7 on my partner’s laptop. Every time I downloaded the nVidia drivers, either from the official site or from laptopvideo2go.com, unpacking them yielded an error saying either Non 7-zip archive. or 7-Zip: Data error.

I tried unpacking the archives manually with 7-Zip, and each time a different set of files would fail CRC inside the archive! So, something is probably going wrong with nVidia’s servers, since other things seemed to be downloading fine.

Forum searching yielded that people just kept retrying the download and eventually it worked. I did this, to no avail. Then I shamefully caved in to superstition and tried downloading with IE (where I had previously used Firefox), and it then worked.

I'm not sure whether I just got lucky with the continual re-downloading, or whether using IE had something to do with it.

Windows 7 and undervolting issues with RightMark on laptops

If you've just installed Windows 7 on your laptop, and are trying to use your old RightMark undervolting settings, but find that either the voltages look completely different (esp. the minimum voltage), or that your previous settings cause a BSOD, then the software has probably autodetected your CPU as desktop rather than mobile. Mine thought it was a Wolfdale rather than a Penryn.

This was pretty irritating at first, since I thought I'd have to go through the painstaking undervolting process all over again. Fortunately, I brought it up with a colleague at work, who mentioned that they'd had the same problem and had noticed the setting was different.

Open up RightMark, go to Advanced CPU settings on the left-hand menu, then change CPU type selection down the bottom to Mobile. You should be able to set your voltages correctly now!

Update: for those who are interested in undervolting, check out this excellent guide, and for Windows 7 x64 users you will need to replace the RTCore64.sys in the RMClock install with this one, not the one linked in the article, which doesn't work. (At least, my experience was that it doesn't work.)

Fun and games with Dell WWAN drivers

First post!

If you own a Dell 5520 WWAN card, you may have found that the x64 drivers will refuse to install on any laptop for which the card has not been "approved" by Dell. The error message is usually "Not a Dell laptop" or something like that. This is a bit annoying, because there's no real reason it shouldn't work in any machine that has the right expansion slot and antennae.

I actually contacted Dell about this problem, and they helpfully suggested that I buy a brand new card. Googling turned up nothing. I wasn't about to fork out for a new card when this one should work perfectly.

So I ended up trying to mess with the installer myself. In the end, I managed to grab the unpacked installation files (before the setup program automagically deleted them), hack the MSI using Orca to bypass the laptop check, and get everything installed and working. All I did was search for AbortInstallation and delete every instance of it that I found. Yeah, nasty, but works!

I hope someone else finds this useful: simply unpack this ZIP file containing the modified x64 drivers installer and run the MSI file. Sorry, no x86 version.

Enjoy!