Updated: Using BitTorrent

I've made a second video on installing the Vuze BitTorrent client. The Client can be downloaded from www.vuze.com. Once you have the client installed you can search google and other sites for torrents to download. Just download and open the ".torrent" file and you are good to go.

You should also have to ensure that the port you've chosen for torrent data is forwarded through your firewall.

The Troublesome Laptop

So I have this Dell Inspiron 5150, which are notorious for having hardware failures. This particular laptop only worked occasionally. The original user thought it was a heating issue, definitely a common problem with this model.

However, this laptop is actually a victim of a bad RAM seat. The DIMM B bus is going bad, and has cost me a memory module. It took a while to diagnose but the main thing I noticed that lead me to the RAM was the intermittent failures both in booting and freezing while running.

I began to get the message, "The amount of system memory has changed. Press F1 to continue..." And after that the piece of RAM in that slot started to have read errors in some sectors. I upgraded the RAM in DIMM A with a 1GB stick and haven't had a problem since. The DIMM B slot remains empty.

While troubleshooting the hardware I also found out that the memory slots are directly connected to the motherboard and would require me to replace the main board in order to fix it.

VirtualBox Shared Folders - Linux Guest

I keep forgetting how to add a shared folders in my Kubuntu guest machine, so I'm posting it here to help remind me.

Select the folder to share on the host.

VirtualBox -> Settings -> Shared Folders -> Add New...

Create a place for the folder on the guest.

cd /home/username/Desktop/

mkdir ShareName

note: username is your user name, ShareName is some meaningful folder name

It is very important to select a folder that has nothing in it. If you do select an existing folder all the contents will be copied into the host folder. This is a big problem if you point the folder to /home/user.

And one final step. If you want to add the folder perminantly and mount it each time on startup, add the following line to the end of the /etc/fstab file.

ShareName /home/username/Desktop/ShareName vboxsf default 0 0

And that is it. Now anything you put in that particular folder you will see in both the guest and the host OS.

Data Recovery from Virus

I just fixed a laptop that wouldn't even load windows. If you know what you are doing a Linux LiveCD can be a saving grace. I was able to back up all the data to an external hard drive and reformat and reinstall Windows. With the Kubuntu LiveCD this took little effort.

There are some limitations to using a LiveCD. But if your computer has a CD-ROM drive, you are in buisiness!

Here is a link to the Kubuntu LiveCD download site. Just choose a mirror and watch your bar crawl.

http://www.kubuntu.org/getkubuntu/download

Happy repairs!

If you have any questions on using Unix or Linux, send me an email.