Wow. It has been a long time since I have written an entry here. Not much has been happening on the computer front, which is a good thing. So far, all my computers have survived the move into my new home, although they are not all set up, yet. And I have no home for my web sites, yet.

I had an interesting thing happen yesterday. It was rather irritating, actually, because it cost me a day of work. The idea of moving into my new home was so that I can telecommute, as I now live 180 miles from where I work. There is no DSL out where I am, yet, and not even cable reaches out here. So, the only options are satellite or wireless (cellular). We went with the wireless option, because we had reports that satellite was a pain in the ass, but we got shit for service from Cingular/AT&T, so we switched to Verizon and things are working OK.

Well, sometimes.

I tried to work from my new home a couple of times, and always wound up having some sort of trouble. We weren't completely moved in, yet (well, we're still not), so I was worried that things weren't going to work out so well.

Yesterday sealed the tomb on that expectation, but in a very unexpected way. I fired up the laptop very, very early in the morning to grab the latest source code from the repository. I let the thing run while I went back to sleep for a couple hours. When I woke up, the laptop was in standby mode, and had just enough power left in the battery for me to save the log file before the laptop died...even though it was plugged into the wall outlet.

I had been having intermittent problems with the power adapter over the past few weeks, so I tried the backup power adapter that I had. Nothing. Both adapters were not working. The charge light would come on for a few seconds (sometimes), then go out.

I had seen reports from the BIOS on startup in the recent past, telling me it could not identify the power adapter. This was a clear message to me that the computer is able to communicate with the adapter somehow. But this thought had not crossed my mind until later in the day - after I had struggled for hours to figure out another way to get some of my work done. But at the end of the day, I remembered this little clue, and on a whim, decided to try plugging the laptop into another outlet on an entirely different circuit in the house.

Lo and behold, the power adapter worked in another outlet! Or, well, for more than a few seconds, anyway. It was intermittent, but was at least working somewhat, unlike where I had it plugged in before. I booted the computer into the BIOS menu and peeked at the power adapter option. I could see it switching between modes, telling me sometimes there was a 65W adapter attached, and other times an unknown adapter attached, and still other times that no adapter was attached.

Apparently, this communication between the adapter and the laptop is continuous, or frequent (and is apparently transmitted across the power lines between the laptop and the adapter), and apparently the laptop turns on the battery charging circuit only when it detects a recognized adapter. And it was when the charging circuit turned on (I could hear it, faintly) that it would start getting confused about what adapter was attached. This suggested to me that there was some kind of RFI or EMI on the circuit I was plugged into, but not enough to disrupt the communication between the laptop and the power adapter, until the charge circuit kicked in and started adding its own noise to the mix.

This convinced me that my suspicion was correct, that the two units were talking to each other. So, I decided it was time to unpack my UPS, which has surge suppression and noise filtering, and try plugging the adapter into that.

Bingo!

I was back in business. The power adapters (both of them) worked flawlessly, and continue to do so, while plugged into the clean power source from the UPS. It seems kind of weird to plug a laptop into a UPS, since the laptop has a battery of its own, but it solves the problem.

So, if you have a Dell laptop and your power adapter is acting strange, go out and get a power strip or power conditioner device that provides noise filtering and try plugging into that, instead.

Now I just have to figure out what is generating so much noise on my power lines! We don't have much running - a refrigerator and a couple clocks on the ovens. The only thing I can think of is maybe the smoke alarm circuit, but I don't think they talk to each other until one is triggered. However, there is a strange phenomenon I have noticed. While laying in my bed at night, in the dark, there is one lamp with a fluorescent bulb in it by the doorway that flashes ever so faintly about every 12 seconds. When I first saw it, I thought maybe it was some kind of static electrical discharge bleeding off through the circuit, but then I started counting the interval, and it was about every 12 seconds, and is probably doing it right now, even though I cannot see it in the daytime.

Something weird is going on. I'm going to try to find out. But just not right now - I have some work to get done.