Laptop Manufacturers (Who really makes Laptops?)

Basically none of the “Name Brand” manufacture their own laptops. The few notable exceptions are Sony, Acer and Apple. Yet, they even do not manufacture all of their own laptops. All of the so called manufacturers buy their laptops from what is called an Original Design Manufacturer (ODM).

ODM – Original Design Manufacturers

ODMs are the true manufacturers who actually design, cast, and assemble the main unit which includes the motherboard, outside casing, and display. A few examples of ODMs are Quanta, Compal, Clevo, Mitac, Asus, Acer, Arima, Uniwill (now ECS/Uniwill) — perhaps you have never heard of these companies before. But you have definitely seen their systems under other well known brand names. ODMs are usually located somewhere in Asia, and may have distribution centers in the US. ODMs distribute their product to Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs). Each ODM sells its computers to many different OEMs.

OEM’s – Original Equipment Manufacturers

OEMs add the Memory, Processor, Hard Drive, Optical Drives and software to the systems. The OEMs perform final assembly and stick their label (Brand) to it, and call themselves manufacturers. Their products are then sold directly to dealers/resellers or directly to the public (i.e. DELL). However most companies such as Dell and HP etc. have their laptops assembled in Asia. Our OEMs are in the USA, assembled in the USA and our 24 hour 7 days a week Toll Free Tech Support is 100% USA. Once these companies add in these components, they have a complete laptop. They then put their label on it and market it.


For example:

Clevo makes the Sager NP9262, the Alienware Area 51, the Voodoo Envy, the Hypersonic Aero …they are all the same computer. An ODM named Compal makes some of the the DELL, Hewlett Packard and Compal.

Quanta makes many of the Dell Latitude, Lenovo (IBM), and Sony Vaio laptops. Clevo is usually first and on the cutting edge when it comes to gaming laptops. So, what does this mean to you? It means don’t get hung up on the brand name when looking to buy, because the company who owns that name probably didn’t build your dream-machine laptop. Instead, focus on these three things: The Warranty: Compare warranties among different vendors. Definitely get a 3 year warranty if your budget allows it. Also be wary of those that offer too much. For example most of the OEM builders offer free shipping to and from on all repairs during the initial warranty. Features: Does it do all you need? Don’t go overboard, but don’t sacrifice. Price: Are you paying for a name, or for features and warranty? Remember, the name does not differentiate the machine from any other.

Flashing BIOS

Change the autoexec.bat file to this & execute the flash one more time :

phlash16 /x /c /mode=3 /bbl /force /MFG /R=5 BIOS.WPH

This will : ignore xms mem manager check, clear cmos, program bootblock, flash in mode 3 (required), force flashing even if bios version is the same, reboot automatically after flash, if flashing a block fails – retry 5 times, flash with BIOS.WPH image.

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Kill process in windows

All of this is possible with the TaskKill command. First, let’s cover the basics. You can kill a process by the process ID (PID) or by image name (EXE filename).

Open up an Administrative level Command Prompt and run tasklist to see all of the running processes:

C:>tasklist

Image Name PID Session Name Mem Usage

========================= ======== ================ ============
firefox.exe 26356 Console 139,352 K
regedit.exe 24244 Console 9,768 K
cmd.exe 18664 Console 2,380 K
conhost.exe 2528 Console 7,852 K
notepad.exe 17364 Console 7,892 K
notepad.exe 24696 Console 22,028 K
notepad.exe 25304 Console 5,852 K
explorer.exe 2864 Console 72,232 K

In the example above you can see the image name and the PID for each process. If you want to kill the firefox process run:

C:>Taskkill /IM firefox.exe /F

or

C:>Taskkill /PID 26356 /F

The /f flag is kills the process forcefully. Failure to use the /F flag will result in nothing happening in some cases. One example is whenever I want to kill the explorer.exe process I have to use the /F flag or else the process just does not terminate.

If you have multiple instances of an image open such as multiple firefox.exe processes, running the taskkill /IM firefox.exe command will kill all instances. When you specify the PID only the specific instane of firefox will be terminated.

The real power of taskkill are the filtering options that allow you to use the following variables and operators.

Variables: STATUS
IMAGENAME
PID
SESSION
CPUTIME
MEMUSAGE
USERNAME
MODULES
SERVICES
WINDOWTITLE

Operators:
eq (equals)
ne (not equal)
gt (greater than)
lt (less than)
ge (greater than or equal)
le (less than or equal)

“*” is the wildcard.

You can use the variables and operators with the /FI filtering flag. For example, let’s say you want to end all processes that have a window title that starts with “Internet”:

C:>taskkill /FI “WINDOWTITLE eq Internet*” /F

How about killing all processes running under the Steve account

C:>taskkill /FI “USERNAME eq Steve” /F

It is also possible to kill a process running on a remote computer with taskkill. Just run the following to kill notepad.exe on a remote computer called SteveDesktop:

C:>taskkill /S SteveDesktop /U RemoteAccountName /P RemoteAccountPassword /IM notepad.exe /F

To learn more about taskkill run it with the /?

From: http://www.tweakvista.com/

Keeping your GMail Inbox size under control

If you go over your storage limit, Gmail will hold your messages for a few days while you clear out some space. If you don’t delete anything within that allotted time, you won’t be able to receive new messages, and messages sent to your account will then be returned to sender.


Before your GMail Inbox space gets almost full, follow one of these tips:

  •  The query string “has:attachment” will list all messages that have an attachment. If you further refine the string to “has:attachment from:me label:sent” – it will show all messages with attachment in the Sent Mail folder that were sent by you. Deleting them can retrieve lot of important space.
  • Queries like filename:pdf or filename:xls will show messages that have attachments of a specific type. Combine them with a label:sent to display all the PDF files that you have you sent in the past. A query of the form “before:2006/01/01 label:sent” will retrieve all message sent by your before January 1, 2006 – You might want to clear your old sent items using this technique.
  • If you have subscribed to tons of mailing lists, now is a good time to get rid of them – you will probably never read them and they are anyway available on the group website. Open a list message, view the header and copy the email address mentioned in the from field. Run a query like from:[email protected] – Choose select all and press delete.
  • GMail won’t allow you to search or sort emails by the size of attachments. However, your offline client will definitely have this feature. Find messages with the bulkiest attachments in Outlook, then search for the same message in GMail and delete it.
  • Don’t use the GMail drives that promise to convert your GMail inbox into a virtual hard disk. You may have to wait a little but both Google and Microsoft are about to launch file storage services. Read more about Google GDrive and Windows Live Drive.

Tips from: Digital Inspiration