My dear Aunty has an Asus Aspire V3-571G-6602 laptop, Win7 64 bit, 500mb, 4G ram, 5 years old (2012/07/04), Windows 7. She only uses Firefox for her email and for browsing. Windows 10 auto-upgraded, she says, without her permission. Furious was an understatement, when, during the install, Windows 10 froze. No amount of rebooting fixed the problem. Her beloved PC, hardly used, was non-functional. Somehow I let it run and after a very long while it repaired itself and came back to life. Microsoft did not make a friend of my Aunty this week, but hopefully she may warm up later. In the meanwhile she is using my Lubuntu 14.04 on a 13 year old laptop, and she really likes it! I am contemplating installing a dual boot ‘buntu, which she will use on a regular basis, but if she desperately needs Windows she can have it as well.
Asus Zenfone 2 Z00ADA ZE551ML, camera circuit board, black body of the round selfie camera connector is cracked. This is unrepairable. Photo 8 by Don Tai
Our Asus Zenfone 2 Z00ADA ZE551ML smartphone has a broken camera. The selfie camera simply does not initialize in the camera app, which says it is not there. We wondered why. There are a lot of complaints about this broken camera, so the problem seems common. We decided to take the phone apart, to take a look and ensure that all the electrical connections were tight. What we found was that the electrical socket that connects to the selfie camera was very cracked. The socket is so small as to be irreparable. This socket could not have been damaged by wear and tear, as all the other components around the selfie camera, including the forward facing camera, are in pristine condition.
Buy a smartphone, you did, but do you really own it? You use your phone when new, but after a while the phone slows down. Is it the phone or are you just getting irritable and impatient with yourself. Relax and wait a bit, right? Maybe not, because your phone may actually be slowing down. It is at this point, around the 1.5 year mark, that you consider buying a new phone. Has your spanky new phone really degraded that much? Smartphones are at least a couple of hundred dollars, so buying a new one every 1.5 years can get very expensive. But do you really need a new one? Remove the bloatware from your phone first, then decide. Bloatware can account for 1/3d of all apps running on your phone, so removing them can make a significant positive difference to the smooth operation of your phone.
