Battery Revival:

The batteries on laptops are often a problem. Most people sit their laptop on a desk and use AC power, so the battery usually suffers, resulting in a chemical 'memory', which gives them a life of about 3 seconds under load. The batteries in my donor laptops were both made in 2000, so I had to try and revive them. If you have any NiCd or NiMH batteries that won't hold their charge, you can often revive them. This is not a new concept, but here is my recipe for reviving rechargeable batteries:

1. Discharge the battery as much as you can.
2. Place in a sealed plastic bag.
3. Place the bag in your freezer for at least 24hours. Overnight is sometimes enough, but I leave it about a week.
4. Take the bag out of the freezer and leave the battery to return to room temperature. Make sure you wipe off any condensation from the battery contacts before you use it. I just leave them in the sun for a few hours.
5. Fully charge the battery, then run it down again, as low as you can get it. Repeat this charge-discharge cycle a few times, and see if you get a longer life.

Your mileage will vary, but two of my 5-year-old batteries are now useful. I get between 2 and 4 hours from one of them, depending on the load on my laptop. You can do this with cellphone batteries, or batteries from lots of other gear.

(courtesy: a freak geek who just ressurects absolutely anything, which is portable)

Well......
first of all I would like to welcome u to my TechBlog. I had no plans for such a blog till an hour ago when i faced a problem with my fav device, yes my compaq notebook(V4118AP). I´ve been using it like a rugged desktop for past two n a half years. It survived thru 5 versions of NFS(not to mention multiple no of players who don´t really care whose laptop is it anyway:p). The very day when i got this machine, i formatted the HDD n installed Mandrake Linux(my old fav) along with Win XP Home n rest of the days it was used as a crash machine, trying out beta softwares n not to forget NFS. Lemme tell you that since that day i never had a glitch in itś performance. Except when for my project i had to run several web servers along with database apps, it became very sluggish, it needed some overhaulin, so i gifted a 1GIG card upgrade durin my 4th SEM project n it was up n runnin like before!!
So that was the story abt my notebook, which demands my attention like no other thing(#RFC;>) Lemme come back to the blog, well few hours ago i was busy with Synaptic(Debian Package manager) suddenly my touchpad stopped working. While tinkering with linux drivers am facing such problems since past 3 4 days n after a no. of reinstallation finally the system was working smoothly, till this crap happened!! I was completely pissed off, n without a thought i just updated touchpad drivers n was sure that itĺl solve the issue. BUT i was wrong! I got a real shock when Windows behaved the same way n there was no sogn of touchpad in Device Manager either. I sighed n connected my usb mouse n started planning for a new touchpad, which would cost me around 8 grands or so....Still as a last try i downloaded the driver n installed n did a reboot......NOTHING CHANGED!!
I was done for the day, my pressario is broken, so was a bit upset, was preparin my bed to sleep, then Don know for wot reason i felt like doin some research on it. So i just turned on the monitor of the server(my roomies desktop:> we hav made it a server to share our WiMAX connection). First address i typed was

http://www.google.com

and the search started. Parallely i was in hardware chat forum discussing steps of trouble shooting the touchpad with an american guy( and also with all the lazy bums who were present in that room. even had a fight with one too, who asked me to reduce my Mesg font size). I was busy listening to their tips, but i had already been thru those steps while troubleshooting. Google returned numerous pages, which were absolutely of no interest to me till i came across this page...