Samsung SA450 (S24A450BW / LS24A450) monitor turning off or no picture

The Samsung SyncMaster SA450 24" LED monitor (aka S24A450BW or LS24A450) is a great bit of kit supporting a resolution of 1920x1200 with DVI or VGA. However it started playing up, sometimes working ok and then abruptly powering off, showing the flashing Analog/Digital symbol as it scans for a signal. Other times it won't show a picture as soon as turned on - ruling out some sort of overheating problem.

I was about to pull the back off the monitor and start looking for faulty capacitors, when I spotted a firmware upgrade on the Samsung website.
http://www.samsung.com/hk_en/consumer/computer-peripherals/monitors/commercial/LS24A450BWT/XK?subsubtype=sa450-led

You can run this Windows updater program to flash the firmware up to v1.1.7 - I did it successfully using Win7 64 bit and a VGA cable. Completely cleared up the no picture fault.

Samsung P10 laptop won't connect to WPA wireless security with SEW-2001M adapter

The standard Samsung driver on the P10 laptop using Windows XP didn't have an option to specify a WPA password to connect to a wireless access point, it was WEP only. It would see the network name but when you connected it didn't even prompt for a password, just went off for a think and came back saying the connection had reset and it was refreshing the network name list.

If you looked in the advanced properties and manually tried to create a wireless profile it only had Open, Shared and WEP as security options.

I uncovered a Samsung driver that updated from the original 7.42 to 7.6 but that was still way back when in 2002 and still no WPA support. There didn't seem to be anything newer and the only support download Samsung offered was a picture editor (way to go Samsung!). I did spot a mention linking the SEW-2001M to an Agere chipset so I followed that line of thought and Googled this site

latest Agere driver for Samsung SEW-2001M

ignore the most recent v8.22 driver - doesn't work with the Samsung - but jump straight to downloading the 7.82 driver. That one works and includes WPA encryption support :-)

To install, extract all the files from the downloaded ZIP file and put them somewhere handy like the desktop or make a C:\DRIVERS directory. Then go into Control Panel > System > Hardware > Device Manager. Expand the network adapters and right-click on the Samsung wireless adapter, choose Update driver and point it to the earlier desktop/directory where you extracted the files to.

Love it when a plan comes together :-)

Samsung in need of therapy

Trawling through overnight server reports first thing in the morning is not the cheeriest introduction to the day, but the caffeine helps - M&S Fairtrade Dark Roast Espresso brewing as we speak, er type.
Just occasionally the reports throw up a real LOL entry. One of my old test servers just reported this

PlugPlayManager. Event ID 12. 02/03/2008 20:10 The device 'SAMSUNG SP0812N' (IDE\DiskSAMSUNG_SP0812N) disappeared from the system without first being prepared for removal.

It's an internal drive! Where did it disappear to and what sort of preparation did it think it needed!? I guess it didn't take well to the request to copy a 4GB file. I've got an image of it slinking out from the back of the PC, to hide behind the filing cabinet, rocking backwards and forwards, whimpering.
We need more error messages like this first thing :-)