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#1
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Poor quality copper in connectors of Acer Aspire E 15 (E5-511-P6VU) ?
Hi,
This is Xposted. After upgrading to cat6 Ethernet cable and Gigabit Ethernet switch, I am still having problems with an Ethernet connection that craps out at 1.0 Gbps. Also at the same time, the filesystem connection to a 64 GB microSD (xSDHC) also craps out. The microSD is mounted in a an SDHC adapter. From my experience, I am inclined always to first suspect hardware fault. So as is my usual technique, I cleaned the contact of the microSD and its adapter first by rubbing with a pink pencil eraser and then with 70% isopropyl alcohol on a Qtip and then a dry Qtip. Neither the pink eraser nor the Qtip showed a grey stain as is common with oxidation. I also tried to clean the Ethernet connector Since I started writing this, 1.0 Gbps connection has crapped out once but now it is re-established. The file system connection to the 64 GB microSD has held steady. Comments? Thanks. |
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#2
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Poor quality copper in connectors of Acer Aspire E 15(E5-511-P6VU) ?
On 2015-12-27 5:36 PM, Norm X wrote:
Hi, This is Xposted. After upgrading to cat6 Ethernet cable and Gigabit Ethernet switch, I am still having problems with an Ethernet connection that craps out at 1.0 Gbps. Also at the same time, the filesystem connection to a 64 GB microSD (xSDHC) also craps out. The microSD is mounted in a an SDHC adapter. From my experience, I am inclined always to first suspect hardware fault. So as is my usual technique, I cleaned the contact of the microSD and its adapter first by rubbing with a pink pencil eraser and then with 70% isopropyl alcohol on a Qtip and then a dry Qtip. Neither the pink eraser nor the Qtip showed a grey stain as is common with oxidation. I also tried to clean the Ethernet connector Since I started writing this, 1.0 Gbps connection has crapped out once but now it is re-established. The file system connection to the 64 GB microSD has held steady. Comments? Thanks. Now both are crapped out. Good thing I also have WiFi. |
#3
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Poor quality copper in connectors of Acer Aspire E 15 (E5-511-P6VU)?
On 12/27/2015 6:05 PM, Norm X wrote:
On 2015-12-27 5:36 PM, Norm X wrote: Hi, This is Xposted. After upgrading to cat6 Ethernet cable and Gigabit Ethernet switch, I am still having problems with an Ethernet connection that craps out at 1.0 Gbps. Also at the same time, the filesystem connection to a 64 GB microSD (xSDHC) also craps out. The microSD is mounted in a an SDHC adapter. From my experience, I am inclined always to first suspect hardware fault. So as is my usual technique, I cleaned the contact of the microSD and its adapter first by rubbing with a pink pencil eraser and then with 70% isopropyl alcohol on a Qtip and then a dry Qtip. Neither the pink eraser nor the Qtip showed a grey stain as is common with oxidation. I also tried to clean the Ethernet connector Since I started writing this, 1.0 Gbps connection has crapped out once but now it is re-established. The file system connection to the 64 GB microSD has held steady. Comments? Thanks. Now both are crapped out. Good thing I also have WiFi. Are you sure your cables are wired correctly? The connection from twisted pairs to the plug is counter-intuitive. There's also more than one color standard. Many of the cables I had failed to work at 1Gbps, but the system did fallback to 100Mbps. One turned out to be a swizzle cable. Worked fine with the autoswizzle in modern ethernet interfaces, but failed at 1Gbps. |
#4
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Poor quality copper in connectors of Acer Aspire E 15 (E5-511-P6VU)?
Norm X wrote:
On 2015-12-27 5:36 PM, Norm X wrote: Hi, This is Xposted. After upgrading to cat6 Ethernet cable and Gigabit Ethernet switch, I am still having problems with an Ethernet connection that craps out at 1.0 Gbps. Also at the same time, the filesystem connection to a 64 GB microSD (xSDHC) also craps out. The microSD is mounted in a an SDHC adapter. From my experience, I am inclined always to first suspect hardware fault. So as is my usual technique, I cleaned the contact of the microSD and its adapter first by rubbing with a pink pencil eraser and then with 70% isopropyl alcohol on a Qtip and then a dry Qtip. Neither the pink eraser nor the Qtip showed a grey stain as is common with oxidation. I also tried to clean the Ethernet connector Since I started writing this, 1.0 Gbps connection has crapped out once but now it is re-established. The file system connection to the 64 GB microSD has held steady. Comments? Thanks. Now both are crapped out. Good thing I also have WiFi. A quick glance at the RJ-45 on my Acer laptop, shows 10u gold plated contacts. A look at my Ethernet cable, shows 10u gold on the contacts on it as well. And my cable has a plastic block with channels to guide the contacts on the cable end, so they cannot move. Only the laptop end uses "beams" that could be displaced if too much force is used. Generally, you want gold-on-gold or tin-on-tin, when mixing connector types. Gold on gold slides, tin on tin bites. Mixing gold and tin would not work well, and it's possible if you examine more pairs of RJ-45s you'll find they're using gold. I do not recommend pink pencil eraser for gold plated finishes. The computer industry uses 10u gold, while telecom parts use 50u gold. No matter what the thickness, a poorly administered gold application can have pinholes. Or, if improperly masked some portions may not get any gold at all. Parts should be rejected, if the gold application is not done properly. Gold is not applied directly over copper. There is an electroplate sequence, with the right materials coming in contact with one another, to achieve the best plating finish and performance over time. When the motherboard PCB is on the soldering line, one of the steps after double-IR reflow is completed, is the wash cycle. The Ethernet connector on your laptop has a rubber bung inserted in the connector, which serves to keep wash water out of the connector. The wash cycle removes water soluble solder flux. If the bung is not water tight, or if no bung was used at all, the washing machine can cause a little bit of flux to coat the nicely prepared 8 gold plated contacts in the RJ-45. Using alcohol alone, should be sufficient to remove this. No pencil eraser is needed, just a bit of solvation. GbE consists of four pairs. The pairs are transformer isolated, and hence differential (one signal goes up when the other signal goes down). The re-routing of signals on GbE, cannot move a defective contact of a pair, so the pair ceases to function on a single open. To make 10/100BT work, only takes two pairs. It's possible the ends could re-negotiate to work with as few as only two of four pairs. But I haven't tried that (tried all possible pairs to see which are sufficient to make it work), and don't recollect any complex re-negotiations being possible. In other words, on a single contact failure, there is every possibility communication can continue at 10/100BT speeds. But I don't know right off hand, what happens if 1,2,3, or 6 are open (the pins on 10/100BT). The signal path chip-transformer-cable-transformer-chip can be tested with Marvell VCT. If you have certain members of the Marvell ethernet chips, they have the ability to "wring out" the connection (test your cable for you). When my P4C800-E Deluxe straight out of the box exhibited a GbE problem, I used Marvell VCT to determine "one pin was open". That test uses TDR (time domain reflectometry) to determine cable impedance. Down at the transformer, the link is resistor terminated in the characteristic impedance of the cable, so when a pulse is sent down the line, there should be no reflection. And that's how VCT can figure out "short", "open", "correctly terminated", just by the waveshape or lack of waveshape. If something is crapping out, I'd be looking elsewhere for an explanation. The new GbE switch, will have power saving features on unused ports. If you sleep the laptop while it is connected to the switch, the switch port may decide there is no electrical activity, and it will go asleep too. This prevents Wake On LAN packets from reaching the laptop. And the user might conclude "something is busted". WOL doesn't work with a lot of GbE switches, due to the power saving feature. My newest motherboard has a number of features, some of which extend into the sleep state. It's possible my Intel GbE could keep the port on the switch alive, if I let it. I've turned all that stuff off at the moment. All you might need, is something like Heartbeat, to keep the switch happy. So there's lots to consider before reaching for a pink pencil eraser, or going back to Wifi. With a pink pencil eraser, you can easily burn through the 10u gold and ruin the future life of the connector (require cleaning again and again until there is nothing left). In terms of triage: 1) Insert and remove connector five times. Gold on gold relies on wiping, and see if normal insertion action will establish a connection on a virgin connector. Five cycles was sufficient to make my P4C800-E work properly. 2) If this fails to work, use alcohol and a swab. Make sure the alcohol is of decent quality and doesn't leave a residue when dried. Put a drop on a shiny clean surface, and see what happens when it dries. 3) Only if you've failed (1) and (2), have examined the connector with a magnifying glass or microscope and see no other choice, would you reach for any sort of abrasive. After all, there is supposed to be gold on some of these things, and gold is a noble metal. An abrasive might well be a temporary solution, until you unsolder the connector and install a new one or replace the cable with another. Ethernet over CAT cabling, is one of the nicest technologies going, in terms of implementation and ability to function. Give it a chance. Paul |
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Poor quality copper in connectors of Acer Aspire E 15 (E5-511-P6VU) ?
On Sun, 27 Dec 2015 17:36:26 -0800, Norm X wrote:
After upgrading to cat6 Ethernet cable and Gigabit Ethernet switch, I am still having problems with an Ethernet connection that craps out at 1.0 Gbps. The 1 Gbps link speed sounds correct, so what does "craps out" mean? Have you tried another Ethernet cable? Cat5, Cat5e, and Cat6 are all easily able to link up at 1Gbps. Have you tried another switch, or another PC? Does "still having problems" imply that you had a networking issue before you upgraded? |
#6
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Poor quality copper in connectors of Acer Aspire E 15(E5-511-P6VU) ?
On 2015-12-27 7:26 PM, Char Jackson wrote:
On Sun, 27 Dec 2015 17:36:26 -0800, Norm X wrote: After upgrading to cat6 Ethernet cable and Gigabit Ethernet switch, I am still having problems with an Ethernet connection that craps out at 1.0 Gbps. The 1 Gbps link speed sounds correct, so what does "craps out" mean? Have you tried another Ethernet cable? Cat5, Cat5e, and Cat6 are all easily able to link up at 1Gbps. Have you tried another switch, or another PC? Does "still having problems" imply that you had a networking issue before you upgraded? Yes all problems with Ethernet were there with Cat 5e cable and a 100Mbps swith. The OS reports loss of connection to DNS. Thunderbird Mail program reports time out with message containing a large enclosure or loss of connections to university mail server. The interesting thing about the 64 GB microSD is that while it is lost to the file system, ReadyBoost still shows up in Resource Monitor. All these selective failures now lead my to mistrust my version of windows 10. I had considered purchase of a version on DVD. The Win10 I have has been upgrade twice over the network. If the network cannot be trusted, bit errors might make it behave poorly. I have Win7 on a desktop machine that I recently upgraded to quad core Q6600. Generally my Win7 gives no errors like my Win10 but the original install was from a DVD whose .iso was downloaded from the net. I that time I was not savvy enough to check checksums. I know that unimportant files are corrupted because Event Viewer says they are. |
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Poor quality copper in connectors of Acer Aspire E 15 (E5-511-P6VU)?
Norm X wrote:
On 2015-12-27 7:26 PM, Char Jackson wrote: On Sun, 27 Dec 2015 17:36:26 -0800, Norm X wrote: After upgrading to cat6 Ethernet cable and Gigabit Ethernet switch, I am still having problems with an Ethernet connection that craps out at 1.0 Gbps. The 1 Gbps link speed sounds correct, so what does "craps out" mean? Have you tried another Ethernet cable? Cat5, Cat5e, and Cat6 are all easily able to link up at 1Gbps. Have you tried another switch, or another PC? Does "still having problems" imply that you had a networking issue before you upgraded? Yes all problems with Ethernet were there with Cat 5e cable and a 100Mbps swith. The OS reports loss of connection to DNS. Thunderbird Mail program reports time out with message containing a large enclosure or loss of connections to university mail server. The interesting thing about the 64 GB microSD is that while it is lost to the file system, ReadyBoost still shows up in Resource Monitor. All these selective failures now lead my to mistrust my version of windows 10. I had considered purchase of a version on DVD. The Win10 I have has been upgrade twice over the network. If the network cannot be trusted, bit errors might make it behave poorly. I have Win7 on a desktop machine that I recently upgraded to quad core Q6600. Generally my Win7 gives no errors like my Win10 but the original install was from a DVD whose .iso was downloaded from the net. I that time I was not savvy enough to check checksums. I know that unimportant files are corrupted because Event Viewer says they are. The only kind of download which is "unprotected", is a direct download of the ISO for Windows 10 from the server. I had two of these fail (I could tell later they were too small). Direct downloads happen, if you attempt to get a copy of Windows 10 using WinXP as the downloading machine or use Linux as the downloading machine. MediaCreationTool should verify the checksum and the size. It should work on a Vista/W7/W8/W10 machine. WindowsUpdate should be similarly protected. Tools like WSUSOffline, or your average web browser, may not deal well with the way the Microsoft servers are set up now. And I don't understand the reason why this is happening (both ends of the transfer appear to be satisfied that the transfer is complete, when the size is obviously not correct). But rest assured, that if a Microsoft tool carries out the download, it will be verified before usage. ******* Before using any computer for serious work, you carry out a memory test, and a load/torture test of the CPU. This is a way of checking that it is working properly. Only then do you install an OS on it. In particular, the Windows registry can be loaded into RAM, and written back out later, so there is potential for the registry to help you spot corruption if the computer itself is responsible. When people overclock Windows machines, sometimes registry corruption is the first sign their overclock is not stable. ******* It's more likely there is some interaction between your various network interfaces, than an issue with the physical network. There were chipsets with particular issues regarding networking. There was one NVidia chipset (Nforce3 era?) with MAC in the Southbridge, which would corrupt a 32 bit word every once in a while. I never did hear whether NVidia was able to fix this, or it was an unrepairable network bug (via driver change). There aren't too many issues like that out there. You can carry out basic network speed tests with something like this. It's a clumsy test tool, requiring the receiving machine to be set up first, then starting a sending program pointed at it. But it's one way to get an opinion about a network. And one slight advantage of a program like this, is it is multiple platform. You can repeat the tests from a Linux LiveCD if you want. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ttcp I got mine here, according to my bookmarks file. http://www.pcausa.com/Utilities/ttcpdown1.htm Paul |
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Poor quality copper in connectors of Acer Aspire E 15 (E5-511-P6VU) ?
On Sun, 27 Dec 2015 20:02:44 -0800, Norm X wrote:
On 2015-12-27 7:26 PM, Char Jackson wrote: On Sun, 27 Dec 2015 17:36:26 -0800, Norm X wrote: After upgrading to cat6 Ethernet cable and Gigabit Ethernet switch, I am still having problems with an Ethernet connection that craps out at 1.0 Gbps. The 1 Gbps link speed sounds correct, so what does "craps out" mean? Have you tried another Ethernet cable? Cat5, Cat5e, and Cat6 are all easily able to link up at 1Gbps. Have you tried another switch, or another PC? Does "still having problems" imply that you had a networking issue before you upgraded? Yes all problems with Ethernet were there with Cat 5e cable and a 100Mbps swith. The OS reports loss of connection to DNS. So it's only a DNS issue, or is it more than that? Which DNS server(s) are you using? Have you tried using other servers? Do you have any networking issues if you bypass DNS, either by using IP addresses directly or by putting entries in your hosts file? What I'm getting at is that if this is only a DNS issue, then it suddenly becomes relatively trivial to resolve. BTW, here are a few DNS servers that you can try. - 4.2.2.2 to 4.2.2.6 - 8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4 - either of the OpenDNS servers Better yet, download and run DNSbench or Namebench to find a fast server near you. |
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Poor quality copper in connectors of Acer Aspire E 15 (E5-511-P6VU) ?
"Norm X" wrote in message
... Hi, Snip From my experience, I am inclined always to first suspect hardware fault. So as is my usual technique, I cleaned the contact of the microSD and its adapter first by rubbing with a pink pencil eraser and then with 70% isopropyl alcohol on a Qtip and then a dry Qtip. Neither the pink eraser nor the Qtip showed a grey stain as is common with oxidation. I also tried to clean the Ethernet connector After 40 years experience of computing, my order of priority for resolving faults is: 1. The user (RTFM) 2. The software (ANY software) 3. The hardware. Your tale of woe seems to be a classic example of the danger of tackling faults the other way around. |
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Poor quality copper in connectors of Acer Aspire E 15 (E5-511-P6VU)?
In article , Paul wrote:
Norm X wrote: On 2015-12-27 5:36 PM, Norm X wrote: Hi, This is Xposted. After upgrading to cat6 Ethernet cable and Gigabit Ethernet switch, I am still having problems with an Ethernet connection that craps out at 1.0 Gbps. Also at the same time, the filesystem connection to a 64 GB microSD (xSDHC) also craps out. The microSD is mounted in a an SDHC adapter. From my experience, I am inclined always to first suspect hardware fault. You changed both the switch and cable; the problem did not change, so it'sprobably not the hardware. Are you seeing any error messages in the Event Logs? So as is my usual technique, I cleaned the contact of the microSD and its adapter first by rubbing with a pink pencil eraser Be careful with that; modern connectors have a very thin layer of gold compared to twenty years or more ago. It's easy to damage the coating with abrasive cleaning. and then with 70% isopropyl alcohol on a Qtip and then a dry Qtip. Neither the pink eraser nor the Qtip showed a grey stain as is common with oxidation. I also tried to clean the Ethernet connector Since I started writing this, 1.0 Gbps connection has crapped out once but now it is re-established. The file system connection to the 64 GB microSD has held steady. Comments? Try disconnecting the microSD and adapter and see if the network becomes stable. Thanks. Now both are crapped out. Good thing I also have WiFi. A quick glance at the RJ-45 on my Acer laptop, shows 10u gold plated contacts. A look at my Ethernet cable, shows 10u gold on the contacts on it as well. And my cable has a plastic block with channels to guide the contacts on the cable end, so they cannot move. Only the laptop end uses "beams" that could be displaced if too much force is used. Generally, you want gold-on-gold or tin-on-tin, when mixing connector types. Gold on gold slides, tin on tin bites. Mixing gold and tin would not work well, and it's possible if you examine more pairs of RJ-45s you'll find they're using gold. All RJ-45 plugs will be gold plated; otherwise they wouldn't be compliant with the Cat5 or Cat 6 specs. I do not recommend pink pencil eraser for gold plated finishes. The computer industry uses 10u gold, while telecom parts use 50u gold. No matter what the thickness, a poorly administered gold application can have pinholes. Or, if improperly masked some portions may not get any gold at all. Parts should be rejected, if the gold application is not done properly. Gold is not applied directly over copper. There is an electroplate sequence, with the right materials coming in contact with one another, to achieve the best plating finish and performance over time. When the motherboard PCB is on the soldering line, one of the steps after double-IR reflow is completed, is the wash cycle. The Ethernet connector on your laptop has a rubber bung inserted in the connector, which serves to keep wash water out of the connector. The wash cycle removes water soluble solder flux. If the bung is not water tight, or if no bung was used at all, the washing machine can cause a little bit of flux to coat the nicely prepared 8 gold plated contacts in the RJ-45. [...] I'm leaning towards a bad driver or IRQ conflict. Checking Event Log would be a good place to look for more clues. Gary |
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