Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Laptop Repair and Upgrade

Laptop repair isnt always easy, but sometimes it can be. If the laptop isnt under warranty and you dont feel comfortable replacing some of these parts yourself, youll have to find a professional to do it. If you only want to upgrade then you cant send it back to the manufacturer and you'll have to find a tech to do it. You can bring it to a well known retailer like best Buy and have their Geek Squad work on it since they're pretty well trained and always do a good job on repairs, or you can find a professional someplace else to do it for you.

Easy to replace parts:

wireless adapter- if your wireless stops working for some reason, you can just go out and get a USB wireless adapter or a pcmcia wireless adapter to put in the card slot.

RAM/Memory- Memory is pretty easy to install and fairly inexpensive. In many cases, you can drastically improve the performance of your laptop just by adding some more memory. Most places that sell laptops can install it for you, or if you feel comfortable installing it yourself you can put it in. There's an enclosure on the bottom that you unscrew in order to install the memory.

Hard Drive: A hard drive can be a little more tricky to upgrade. If your hard drive gets corrupted, youll probably lose most of your data unless a professional can recover it. Then you'd just have to toss it out and buy a new one and have it installed. The #1 reason for hard drive corruption is abuse, so be careful with your laptop if you wanna keep your hard drive safe. If you just want to uprgrade to have more space, first youd need to back up your data and then take the old drive out and put the new one in. A hard drive upgrade is similar to a RAM upgrade. There is an enclosure usually on the bottom that contains the hard drive. In gateway laptops it's usually in the front for easy access.

Not so easy to replace parts:

For these repairs you'll definitely have to take it to a professional, or sometimes it'll actually be more worth it and less hassle just to junk it and buy a new one

CPU: If you want to upgrade the CPU in your laptop, you're going to have a hard time because usually the motherboard has to be changed as well. You'd be better off just buying a new laptop. On the other hand, if your processor goes bad for some strange reason and you want to install the same one or even a higher speed version of the same processor, it is doable. Youll probably have to ship it out or find a professional to do this.

Motherboard: Upgrading or replacing the motherboard can be a hassle as well, and costly. Again, you'd probably be better off just buying a new laptop unless you have a good warranty and you're willing to go through the hassle of shipping it out.

keyboard Keys: When a key pops off the keyboard, it usually cant be put back on, so if your laptop is under warranty youll need to send it out for repair. Otherwise you can take it to a tech and have them order the keys you need.

Graphics card: Since laptops dont have as much room as a desktop computer, the graphics card is usually integrated onto the motherboard. If you really think it's worth it to spend the money and replace the guts of your laptop, go right ahead. Otherwise I'd say buy a new laptop with a very good graphics card so you'll never feel the need to upgrade.

Various other upgrades and add-ons can be done through USB or the pcmcia card slot. For example, if you get more involved with things like sound and video, there are certain expansion cards you can buy depending on what you're trying to accomplish. They're usually plug and play and very easy to install.

I work in retail, and my website is a buyer's guide for laptops for people who don't really know which direction to go in. I'm 22 now and computers have been my hobby since i was twelve. If you wanna check out my website or e-mail me with suggestions visit http://www.laptop-buyers-guide.com. My email is Tarbash_200@yahoo.com

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The Blissful Body of the Yogi(ni): Yidam Practice & Yoga Asana

Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche, a Tibetan yogi often compared to the great Milarepa, when addressing the issue of Yidam practice within the Vajrayana vehicle of Tibetan Buddhism, has said: It is the blissful body of the yogi or yogini that is the true Deity. So what might this mean? And how, if at all, is it (or could it be) related to the practice of Yoga asana? Lets explore

Yidam practice unfolds in two stages: (1) The Generation or Creation Stage, in which the specific deity that one is working with is created, i.e. given a form within the imagination of the practitioner; and (2) The Completion Stage, in which that created form of the deity is dissolved: resolved into emptiness, and (its residue, its true intelligence) light/radiance. The practice also, over time, evolves from one in which the deity is merely a conceptual projection, to one in which the natural deity appears, non-conceptually, before the practitioner, as a visible aspect of his/her own radiance.

Yidam practice as a whole is based, in large part, upon a productive use of the imagination. It takes that capacity (and strong tendency) most of us have to make mental pictures, and uses this as a tool to align us with, open us to, a reality that is deeper, more profound, and truer than the one were habitually tuned into. The imagined forms of the deities have the quality of being able, potentially, to act as portals, or gateways into these deeper realities to put us in touch, directly, with aspects of awakened mind.

Now its important to notice the distinction between ~ on the one hand ~ this Yidam-practice way of using our imagination (as a very specific form of mental training, which ultimately can liberate us), and ~ on the other hand ~ a use of the imagination which amounts to no more than (habitual, and often largely unconscious) fantasizing. To engage in fantasy is ~ from the perspective of Buddha Dharma ~ a non-productive use of the imagination: one that takes us further into the territory of conceptualization, mental elaboration, and as such further and further away from a reality which has the potential to liberate us.

So how does any of this relate to the practice of Yoga asana? We could, first of all, consider each specific asana as a deity-form: something we construct/project (a la the Creation Stage) and then dissolve (a la the Completion Stage). And certainly asana practice is based largely upon a distinction between productive and non-productive alignments/uses of the body. The productive alignments (a la the productive uses of mental imagination) are those which have the potential to open us into a reality deeper than the mere physical, e.g. to the level of the central Channel/Shushumna Nadi, and the subsequent conscious flow of that awakened energy outward, into the whole network of nadis within the subtle body of the yogi or yogini. The non-productive alignments (a la fantasies), on the other hand, simply keep the energy of our subtle bodies circulating unconsciously (divorced from the truth of the Shushumna Nadi) in old samskaric patterns, i.e. keep us circling on the wheel of bith-and-death which in Buddhism is called Samsara.

And in the same way that in deity practice there is an evolution from the deity as a mere conceptual projection (though a potentially productive one!) to the non-conceptual appearance of the natural deity; just so in our asana practice we often begin with a rather outside-in approach, in which the asana is actually a form of conceptual projection, i.e. its an idea we have (from our teacher, or books, or whatever) that we put forth in the form of an arrangement of (the appearance of) bones, muscles, etc. but its not yet real or natural. As our asana practice matures, more and more were able to work from the inside-out, in which the asanas emerge spontaneously, non-conceptually, as aspects of our natural intelligence/radiance. Our movements in and out of the asanas are infused with the spirit of what in Taoism is called Wu Wei: an effortless effort which quite naturally produces the correct alignments (as opposed to imposing those alignments based upon some external moral code of asana practice).

So how then do we progress from a conceptual to a natural way of expressing our asana practice? From the poses as mere conceptual projections to expressions of an awakened bodymind? A practitioner of the Generation Stage of Yidam practice might move in this direction by finding the Completion Stage within the Creation Stage, by finding the dissolution of the form as an inherent aspect of the form itself (much as ~ in Taoist theory/practice ~ Yang is an inherent aspect of Yin: they inter-are). In this same way, our asana practice might re-member the dissolution of form within every form/asana taken. And might ~ to extend the principle ~ put into conscious and ever-evolving relationship all opposing movements So little by little our ideas about the right way to do the pose are replaced by an ever-more-subtle tremoring which spontaneously aligns us in a way that allows our conceptually projected body to dissolve into the blissful body of the deity: an aspect of our own radiance, pouring forth, shedding itself continuously, for the benefit of all living beings.

One of the initial trainings in dream Yoga ~ once the practitioner is able to be lucid (i.e. awake) within the dream ~ is to transform the body: to change the shape of ones body into the body of a bird; into an airplane (and fly to Paris!); or ~ relevant to our current exploration ~ into the shape of a deity, which ~ in the context of dreaming ~ is quite easy to experience and understand as being an empty form, i.e. a form made only of color, light & energy (much like a rainbow). In this same way, our vinyasa ~ our movement in and out of asanas, upon the thread of our awakened breath ~ might become, with practice, a kind of Rainbow Painting (Ive borrowed the phrase from a book with this same title written by Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche): merely a play in color, light and energy, a toggling back and forth between the display of empty forms (the specific asanas), and the bliss which is the residue of their dissolution.

And this, perhaps, represents ~ simultaneously ~ the waking up of the dream of our asana practice, and the waking up of the dream of our Yidam practice; represents the waking up from the dream/fantasy of religious practice into the blissful radiance of the Present Moment Amen and Sobeit.

Elizabeth Reninger has been exploring yoga ~ in its Hindu, Buddhist & Taoist forms ~ for more than twenty years, and is a student of Richard Freeman and Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche. She is also a published poet, and currently resides in Boulder, Colorado. For more essays on yoga-related topics, please visit her website at: http://www.writingup.com/blog/elizabeth_reninger

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Standalone CD-ROM Copiers

The operational details of stand-alone CD-rom copiers are similar to those of automatic CD copiers. The only difference between the two is the difference between the CD and the CD-rom.

CD-rom means CD-Read only memory (ROM). No additional data can be written on these CDs once they are recorded. The recording of CD-ROMs is done by the vendor and is known as stamping. However, the data from these CDs can be written on other blank CDs using a CD-rom copier, provided the necessary software is available.

CD-rom copiers work on the technology called "pits and hills." CD-ROMs are coated with an organic layer of dye. When the CD-ROMs are written, the data is encoded on them by burning specific parts of the organic dye coating. These parts are called pits and the remaining parts are called hills. While burning, a laser head reads the pits and hills and then burns the corresponding regions on the blank CDs. This results in the same data getting transferred onto the blank CDs.

The CD-rom drives are rated with a speed factor relative to music CDs: 1x or 1-speed provides a data transfer rate of 150 kilobytes per second in the most common data format. For example, an 8x CD-rom data transfer rate would be 1.2 megabytes per second.

CD-rom copiers may be attached to a computer or they may be stand-alone. stand-alone CD-ROMs have a hard disc of their own. These CD-rom copiers are designed in a tower format. stand-alone CD-rom copiers may allow several CDs to be burned at once and may contain as many as 2 to 16 unitary drives and can have speeds as high as 52X.

So, if the requirement is to copy a master CD into several CD-ROMs, a high-end stand-alone CD-ROM copier may be the best solution.

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