Friday, November 27, 2015

Cube Talk 7X U51GT will not charge or turn on

Sometimes you can get the screen to flash, briefly, when pressing and holding the on key.

This can happen when the tablet battery is pretty much completely depleted.

It should boot when plugged in to a charger, but some (most?) chargers are too wussy to supply all of the current the tablet wants.  So the tablet starts up, decides the charger ain't cutting it, and shuts down again.  (Or maybe it's the power supply system of the tablet at fault - it can't draw more than a certain amount of current.  Or both.)

One solution is to use a USB battery pack instead of a wall charger.  Battery packs are rarely limited in their output current, and can deliver 2.5A or more if the tablet demands it.  This can sometimes let the tablet boot normally and it will start the normal recharging process - and besides which, it will recharge faster.  Banggood often has Xiomi packs on for good prices, I recommend everyone to pick one up.

Another solution may be to use a high-current USB charger.  Be aware, however, that most "2A" or "2.5A" rated wall chargers are nothing of the sort.  Most will barely source 500 mA or so, meaning they're no better than a "standard" charger, and may still fail.  Also, the Cube and most other tablets can't draw 2A anyway.

Finally, you can try the rubber band trick noted in the comments in this YouTube video.  Basically, plug it in, then hold down the on key for 5-20 minutes.  This is obviously best done with elastic bands.  This seems to force the tablet to stay active, or at least enough to jumpstart the charging process.  The author says 20 minutes but I've had success with only 5 minutes of holding.

(I know I saw this elastic band trick mentioned elsewhere, but I can't find it again.  Comments on the alternative/original location welcome.)

Of course, you might find - as I have recently - that the deeply-depleted pack of the tablet IS in fact charging - just very slowly.  This is typically done for safety purposes, to avoid battery overheating and other issues.  Holding the power button doesn't seem to affect this, at least not always.  So leave it overnight and see what happens.


Thursday, November 26, 2015

Sudden inability to drag maximized windows in Windows 7

Problem:  You used to be able to drag a maximized window to "un-maximize" it.  Now you can't.

Solution:  Per this post at SuperUser, uncheck "Prevent windows from being automatically arranged when moved to the edge of the the screen" in Control Panel / Ease of Access Center / Make it easier to focus on tasks.

Note:  It might take several seconds for Windows to apply this setting after hitting "OK" or "Apply".  If you test it too early, it may seem like nothing changed.  Wait 10 seconds and try again before deciding that unchecking the feature did not work.

Fixing Excel "Cannot shift objects on sheet" without deleting all your comments

You probably already know by now that "Cannot shift objects on sheet" is probably caused by a misbehaving comment.  It prevents you from hiding columns; in some cases it might also prevent you from inserting columns.

Deleting all your comments is one solution.  If you have a lot of comments, this will not be a preferable solution.

Another solution that is not frequently mentioned is to fix all the comments so that they are set to "move and size with cells".  The misbehaving comment is probably not so set.

It is possible to do this manually.  Obviously with anything more than about 10 comments, this is impractical.  Besides, your comments are probably all over the damn place since they have not been moving with their target cell.

To fix this, you can use "A macro to un-mess Excel comments", as posted at  m2otech.com.  This macro changes all comments to "move and size with cells", plus some other cleanup.

After running the macro, I was able to successfully hide my problematic columns.  Plus my worksheet looked a lot neater.

If you get compile errors in Excel, you may need to reformat the following lines of the macro to exist on a single line (i.e. without carriage returns):

MsgBox ("A total of " & CommentCount & " 
comments in worksheet '" & MySheet.Name & "' of workbook '" 
& MyWorkbook.Name & "'" & Chr(13) & "were repositioned 
and resized.")


Useful options to know when debugging this problem:

In Options/Advanced/Display, you can set comments to always show.  This can be useful.  (You can set it back to "show on hover" later.)

Also in Options/Advanced/Display, you can set "all" objects to show.  This can also be useful.  This option can also be toggled with CTRL-6.

Some people find that just messing with the above two options is enough to fix their issue.  Not so for me.

Wednesday, November 25, 2015

Googlebar Lite mysteriously disappears and will not show

Problem:  Googlebar Lite mysteriously disappears from Firefox.  "Googlebar Lite" is checked in Toolbars, but Firefox shows an empty toolbar instead of the Googlebar Lite toolbar.

Solution:  Try enabling "Additional Toolbar" or "Additional Toolbar (2)".  That may cause your Googlebar Lite toolbar to show again.

Hey, it worked for me.  Don't ask me why.