I only went as deep into this as necessary to answer the question, so it’s not going to be that detailed. Anyway, we will cover the disassembly and reassembly of the motor housing which will give you DIY-ers access to the on-off switch and motor of your Hyla Vacuum Cleaners:

Tools needed: Flat screwdriver or small pry tool and a small phillips screwdriver.

1. Pry up on the ends of the carrying handle cover using a flat screwdriver or something similar. This part is friction fit into the screw holes and seems to be made from tough material so dig in there, alternating ends to keep it coming up straight.

Removing Hyla Vacuum Handle Trim

Handle Trim Removed.

2. Remove the two screws holding the carrying handle to the body of the machine. Remove the handle.

3. Remove the top cover.

Handle and Top Cover Removed

4. Pull up gently on the motor housing. There are no screws holding this large piece of plastic. Mine popped right off. You should now see the switch and the top of the motor.

Motor Housing Removed

Re-Assembly Notes:

1. When positioning the motor housing, accommodate the switches first, then make sure the power cord strain relief is in it’s slot in the notch in the back of the motor housing.
2. Press down evenly around the housing and you should hear a satisfying snap indicating that the housing has seated properly.
3. Now re-install the top cover and the handle.
4. Finally press the handle trim piece back into place.

Strain Relief aligns with Slots in Motor Housing

So there you have it!  A much easier job really than the Hyla Vacuum Cleaners brush maintenance.  I’m not volunteering to disassemble the entire vacuum , but feel free to ask or comment if I can help!

Brett

I used to read all the time. Louis Lamour and other westerns, Clive Cussler and the adventure genre were some of my favorites. For my return to reading I’ve decided to read business and marketing oriented books to increase my knowledge of my chosen area of expertise.

I got the recommendation for my first book from Cory Miller and James Dalman’s Webdesign.com reading list. It’s called The Tipping Point by Malcom Gladwell and I thought I’d share my thoughts on it.

This was my first Malcom Gladwell book and I’m sure it won’t be the last. I like his writing style. The Tipping Point is a book about change and some deep thinking on epidemics. Gladwell himself describes the book as an “intellectual adventure story”. It largely exposes some concepts that you will have to walk around with for a while before the practical use becomes apparent. At least that has been my experience.

From the description of the book I was hoping to get some practical ideas for creating more interest in my business, i.e. to improve my marketing efforts. It’s not that kind of book. I think it just might turn out to be better.

In the book, Gladwell spends a lot of time developing the idea of how epidemics are started and spread and gives specific examples. Some of the examples are about disease epidemics as you might expect but the others are about crime, fashion, bad habits and school shootings. I’ll have to admit that in the middle of some of the lengthy examples he almost lost me. If this happens to you, stick with it. At the end you’ll realize that you need the benefit of the examples in order to apply the principles.

Gladwell’s findings are that almost always, a tiny percentage of the do the majority of the work to start an epidemic. He calls this the Law of the Few. The other two rules of The Tipping Point are The Stickiness Factor and The Power of Context. He uses these three rules to organize thinking about epidemics and help us to understand how to create a Tipping Point of our own.

Carrying out the rules of the Tipping Point are three main types of people. Gladwell calls these Mavens (information brokers and are teachers), Connectors (who know “everybody”) and Salesmen (excellent at influencing people).

Again, examples from various parts of history are given including Paul Revere (a Connector and a Maven). Each of these people play a different but vitally important role in an epidemic.

With my subconscious mind armed with the concepts about how and why epidemics are created and spread I am now watching for that piece of information that will help me answer the question that Gladwell leaves us with in the Afterward of the book. That question is: “How do I find the Mavens that will spread the word about my particular business?” or put differently, how do I build a Maven trap?

The last few pages of the book are the best in my opinion, but would be of much less value without the experience of the examples so again, stick with it. It’s worth it.

In conclusion, I highly recommend The Tipping Point. If you’ve read the book and figured out how to build a Maven trap in your business, I’d love to hear about it. Why not leave a comment?

A couple of weeks ago I was being a good hubby and was helping out with some household chores. We have a Hyla NST vacuum and Amy got it out of the closet to start cleaning the floors.

There are two main attachments for the Hyla NST. One is for hard/smooth floors and the other is for carpet. I noticed that she was running the smooth floor sweeper on our rug in the living room , so I asked why? “The [Electro-Brush] is throwing white dust when I use it, so I just use this one.” Wha? This is a thousand dollar machine and it’s not doing any good using the wrong attachment.

So I decided to investigate. The problem was that the Hyla Electro Brush was stopped up with various stuff, mainly some type of deodorant powder that she sprinkled on the carpet before vacuuming. This stuff had built up and started trapping more dirt and debris until the passage way was mostly blocked. It was also this stuff that was fogging out of the brush.

The only way to clean it out was to disassemble it. Of course i turned to Google first, but I found precious little about it. The user-guide on Hyla’s website was no help either, so I decided to take a couple of pictures and document the procedure for the benefit of someone else who may have the same problem.

Of course this information carries no warranty. This procedure was successful for me but your mileage may vary.

Tools needed: Phillips screwdriver and flat-head screwdriver or something similar for prying.

First, disconnect the Electro-Brush from the vacuum and any power source and flip it over. There are six screws to loosen and/or remove on the bottom.

Step 1 - Remove six screws.

Once those screws are out, flip it right side up and remove the top cover. This can be done with a flat screwdriver or other prying tool. Take your time as plastic parts can break pretty easily, but once you get it started it comes right off. The build quality of the Hyla is pretty good and the plastic is relatively tough.

With the top cover removed, you can see a white inner cover. Two screws hold this cover on. Remove those.

Step 2 - Remove screws holding inner cover.

Before removing the white inner cover, unwrap the white lamp wires from the slots in the cover. You want to push those wires down through the slot in the inner cover as you remove it. This will prevent the wires from being disconnected from the ballast underneath. Ask me how I figured this one out! You’ll want to eventually disconnect these wires, but you need to see where they go first.

Step 3 - Unwrap Lamp Wires

The handle catch lever also needs to be removed. This is the “trigger” that you push with your foot to release the handle from the upright position. It just snaps into place. The thing to watch out for here is the little spring underneath the lever. Make sure you don’t lose it.

Now you can remove the inner cover and the tubular handle.

It’s a good idea to mark the ballast wires where they connect to the circuit board and go ahead and unplug them to get the cover out of the way.

Step 4 - Inner cover removed.

Now you’re ready to give the air passage ways a good cleaning. I used the same flat screwdriver to scrape and chisel the build-up away. I also had quite a bit of string, hair, etc. wrapped around the ends of the rotating brush head, so I cleaned that off as well.

Step 5 - Clean Enough

Once you’re happy with the cleaning it’s time to re-assemble. Basically just reverse the order of the steps above. Remember to re-attach the tubular handle and the ballast wires before installing the inner cover. Pull the lamp wires back through the cover as you lower it down onto the base. After replacing the screws in the inner cover, re-wrap the lamp wires.

Install the handle release lever (don’t forget the spring!), then the outer cover. Flip the assembly back over and re-install the six screws from the bottom.

Congratulations! Your Hyla should suck as good as new. It was unbelievable how much dirt was in the water tank when I got through vacuuming the first time after doing the cleaning.

Prevention is better than cure, so from now on we’re not going to use any of the carpet powder, but eventually this will have to be done again. At least I’ll have this post to refer to.

If this information helped you, let me know in the comments.

Brett

The upgrade process

As I suspected, the hot topic surrounding Windows 7 upgrades was just how far one could go toward performing a clean install with upgrade media.  First to clear up a couple of technical terms. Upgrade media are the disks that Microsoft sells that allow you to install Windows 7, but only activate if you have a qualifying installation of a previous version of Windows. In contrast the Full version of windows by definition can be instlalled on a clean hard drive with no previous Windows install present. The other big thing is that Upgrade media costs less than the full version.

Here’s how my upgrade went. I removed my original 160 GB drive with XP on it, and installed a new 320 GB drive. After printing out the Windows 7 upgrade guide by WinSuperSite’s Paul Thurott,  I booted the system with the Windows 7 upgrade disk in the drive and followed the prompts to do a custom install.  The install went smoothly.  It’s a relatively quick install, but the question was, would it activate successfully once it phoned home to Redmond?  The answer was no. At least not initially.

Paul did a great job researching and experimenting with the upgrade media. His suggested next step after a failed activation was to do a “registery hack”.

Method #2: Registry hack
Note: This workaround is not supported by Microsoft but my understanding is that it has a 100 percent success rate.

The registry hack worked for me. Activation was successful after performing the steps outlined and re-booting my laptop.

On a side note, I have also upgraded my wife’s Vostro 1520 laptop. I ordered upgrade media from Dell (which they sent at no charge). They will only send an equivalent disk. In other words, since the Vostro came with Vista Home Premium 32 bit, they sent Windows 7 Home Premium 32 bit. We decided we might want to upgrade the RAM in the future from 3GB to 4GB or more which really requires a 64bit OS. So I backed up and then did a custom install with MY 64 bit upgrade disk from Amazon. After entering the license key from the disk from Dell the activation went smoothly. I wanted to throw that in there in case anyone else is wondering about doing a similar upgrade.

Windows 7 Review

During the summer I got my first case of Mac fever. I read MacBook Pro reviews, watched videos and read message boards.  I made up my mind that I would get a MBP, but would wait at least a year. I think the best compliment for Windows 7 is that I no longer have Mac fever. Well . . . maybe a little!   Microsoft has really closed the gap. Despite the warnings by the aforementioned Mr. Thurott, I have come to really like the new task bar. I can see where it might confuse some people, but pinning programs and re-arranging icons is great.

I wrote about Libraries in Seven during my beta test and that remains my favorite feature I think. On the visual front, I like the semi-transparent task bar and window frames and the “slideshow” wallpaper that changes on set intervals. Speaking of wallpaper, I just downloaded some great wallpaper images from National Geographic. These are great if you like landscapes.

This is getting long so I’ll just mention a couple more things that have worked really well for me. One is networking. Windows 7 calls it Home Group.  It’s just easy. “It just works” is a phrase that Apple fans like to use. Well, so far Windows 7 “just works” for me. The other thing I use all the time is sleep-mode. That’s a simple thing, but XP would lock up coming out of sleep half the time so I never used it.  Now it’s like near instant boot-up out of sleep.

It really is time to move on from Windows XP.   Windows 7 is rock solid, clean looking and runs all my apps and hardware flawlessly. Way to go Microsoft!

Brett

Since I’m running Windows XP Pro I’m going to be doing what Microsoft refers to as a custom install. My 160 GB laptop drive has 25 GB free so I’ve decided to do the install on a clean drive (hopefully). I haven’t found a definite answer that this is even possible or not.

At any rate I placed an order this morning for a new 320 GB drive for my laptop, expecting to get it on Friday with my 2-Day Prime shipping. The delivery esitmate is Monday the 26th. My stuff almost always ships the same day. I placed the order early this morning so I’m wondering if all the Windows 7 shipments are slowing up the normal pace of things at Amazon?

Anyway, I’m definitely making the move to Seven, but I’m going to move in deliberate steps. Hopefully someone else will have experience doing an XP upgrade to a new drive over the weekend. If that’s you I’d love to hear from you! I will return the favor as soon as my new drive is delivered.

The problem to be solved was basically a website that hadn’t had a design update since about 1998. It was still doing a pretty good job of presenting the inventory of used Jeeps to visitors and was ranked very good (#2 at Google at the time of this writing) for the main keyword, “used jeeps”.

Although the old design was very long in the tooth, it was just the tip of the iceberg shaped problem. The site was being maintained with Dreamweaver MX by the owner who really had no desire to be a webmaster. The site had been transferred to him some time ago and the previous webmaster had given the minimum of instructions on keeping it afloat. So what we really had was a workflow problem from one end to the other. Here’s a before screen-shot of the home page:

I was asked to get involved when the upstart new sales guy at Gilbert’s (my Uncle, Dennis ) talked Grant into purchasing a new PC. The only way they had of accessing the site was through the Dreamweaver MX interface and the install disks had been misplaced and of course the new PC didn’t come with Dreamweaver pre-installed. It turned out to be a blessing because I got to see the old workflow in action and it was painful to watch!

After seeing what had been going on for several years I proposed an extreme site makeover, webejeeping edition . I wanted to set up a system so that a relatively inexperienced PC user could be trained to maintain it. The system would start with importing photos of a newly acquired Jeep and end when that vehicle sold.

On the other side of the coin, I wanted to make it as easy as possible for the site visitor to find information about all the vehicles in the current inventory including an attractive, more “sticky” design, larger more consistent images (that took up less disk space on the server too), and to lower the communication barrier by including contact forms at strategic places in the site. The old site had the email address displayed in text so that spam bots could find it easily. This new site needed to be much more spam resistant and the contact forms provided the needed protection.

Since I love to use WordPress as a Content Management System, I started looking around in my inventory of premium WordPress Themes from iThemes and decided that the iCar Theme would make an excellent starting point for the major framework of the site.

Here’s a shot of what I came up with:

To optimize the images, I had been using the Image Resizing Power Toy application from Microsoft, but it only worked with XP and since the new PC came with Vista it wouldn’t work. I found a replacement called VSO Image Resizer which is just as convenient and adds a couple of features that make it very handy. So now instead of 1mb+ images that take a long time to download the visitor gets 800 pixel wide images that are under 100k and still look great. Best of all it’s easy. The program adds a menu item to the right-click context menu so it’s super easy to launch.

I had recently watched a CSS-Tricks.com screencast about advanced uses for WordPress custom fields. It was very timely and I borrowed heavily from some of Chris’s techniques to put together custom templates for the Jeep-type index pages. I also created a custom template for the Jeep details page that utilized the full-width of the template.

Since I was making heavy use of WordPress custom fields, I needed a way to easily enter the data each time. For this I used the Custom Fields Template plugin. It worked very well. About half the vehicle data can be entered just by clicking on check boxes and radio buttons. This makes the data much more consistent and should make it easier for site visitors to compare the features of different vehicles. Other plugins that came in handy were Lightbox 2 for full-size image display and RSS Includes Pages which makes sure all pages get included in the RSS feed and not just posts which is default.

I got help from several other sites that I didn’t make note of (sorry!) as well as the WordPress Codex. I’m happy with the results so far! They have already had people coming to the lot after looking at the vehicles online and had good things to say about the ease of navigation and nice presentation of information. The volume of email coming in from the site has picked up quite a bit as well. The web forms really lower the barrier between the visitor and the business.

So go browse around on WeBeJeeping.com right now. If you’re working on a WordPress project and see a feature you have questions about feel free to email me with questions. Also I can now officially offer web hosting along with design services and I’d love to quote your website project.

Oh yeah, if you’re in the market for a Jeep, then find one you like, contact Grant or Dennis at Gilbert’s and make an offer!

Brett

Here are my personal priorities and considerations for picking domains:

1. Shortest .com that I can live with while avoiding dashes or special characters. If you’re lucky enough to find your preferred address ending in .com then stop reading this and register it! Now! Even for churches and organizations I recommend at least parking the .com even if you decide to use the .org version.

2. Will I be communicating the domain verbally? If so it needs to be memorable. Also consider the savvy-ness of the audience you’re communicating to. If your audience is relatively new to the web it’s even more important to stick with the familiar dot-com domain. If you run with a tech savvy crowd, then they are most like ready for anything you throw at them.

3. If people will be finding the site using primarily links online from your other profiles (Facebook, MySpace, etc.) then they’re just going to click on it mainly and the length and memorable factor is less important.

4. Will you print it on business cards? If it’s too long it might not fit well. Also three words are more difficult to remember than two. Keep it as short as possible.

5. If it’s a commercial site that you want to make money with then the decision is much more important than if it’s a personal / business card / blog type thing. If somebody wants to really wants to see your site (they know you or want to get to know you) they will spend the time to figure out what it is. If you’re trying to catch the general population of casual surfers you better make it as easy as possible because you only have a couple of seconds (literally) to hold their attention. Commercial sites need relevant, memorable names. Don’t get cute with it.

I know I promised five tips but here’s a bonus. Try NameBoy.com. You’ll know what it does when you get there so no further explanation is necessary. I’ve never registered a domain without running it by NameBoy.

So those are my top five considerations for choosing a domain name. I’ll give some registrar and hosting recommendations in a later post. Hint: Don’t default to Godaddy. There are other alternatives that don’t use questionable advertising practices.

Brett

I’m way behind in updating my Windows 7 experience. There’s a good reason! I have had no further experience with Windows 7. No, I haven’t given up on it or changed my mind about how good an operating system I think it is. Fact is I got busy over the summer and had to go back to my XP drive.

I’m not that dependent on MS Office, but I need it every once in a while and I decided it just wasn’t worth the trouble of re-activating it. Also I didn’t want to invest any more time in this operating system that I would have to re-install come October.

So right now I’m just waiting for Windows 7. I took advantage of the pre order for Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade at Amazon.com so I should get my copy on October 22nd.

I plan to install Seven on a fresh hard drive. I need a bigger drive anyway and it would just make me feel better if I had the old XP disk intact just in case I need to revert. There’s probably some licensing issues with that strategy and it’s still not clear if that will even be possible. I’m confident someone will figure out how to do it though. I will report my experiences here so stay tuned.

Brett

I do remember the computer lab in college having some type of Apple computer. Probably an early Macintosh operating system. I never paid much attention to Macs because they wouldn’t run games like Wing Commander, which I spent hours playing between classes.

Lately though, I’ve been bitten by the “Mac Bug”. I don’t play games any more and I just want to get some work done. My main work is processing photos and web development and from what I hear a Macintosh PC is great for that.

I stopped at an Apple Store a couple of months ago and I have been reading a lot of reviews about MacBook Pro since then. I’m wondering if the 13″ Macbook Pro screen will be big enough for those infrequent times that I’m on an overnight photo shoot. Otherwise I’d have it connected to a 22″ Dell 2209WA monitor which is due to arrive here within the hour ~8-)

——–
Sidebar:
The Dell 2209WA display (I got two) arrived as I was typing this. Of course I had to hook one up and I’m looking at it now as I type this. Out of the box it looks great. Maybe too bright, but I’ll adjust it later and maybe do a full review post.
——–

During my Mac research I noticed a bunch of people recording “Unboxing Videos”. So instead of immediately opening their new MacBook they set up a video camera and record their experience. I wanted to make an exaggerated version of those as a parody, but I ended up just doing a “for the record” type of thing with my wife’s new Vostro 1520 from Dell. Her school sytem is actually almost anti-Mac so she decided to go ahead and fit in with a Windows PC this time.

Anyway, enough rambling. Here’s the video I recorded on my Sony Hi8 camcorder and imported and edited with Windows Movie Maker that comes with Win Vista Home Premium. Enjoy!

Here are the specs on this Vostro 1520:

• Intel Core2 Duo 2.24 Ghz
• 3GB RAM
• 320 GB HDD
• 15.4″ Widescreen
• Vista Home Premium (Make sure you specify the Windows version you want when ordering a Vostro. They were going to put Home Basic on this one until I caught it.)
• Webcam built into the monitor
• Express Card slot.
• 4x USB 2.0 Ports (2 left / 2 right)
• IEEE 1394 (Firewire) port on right.
• CD/DVD Burner (Tray-loading)
• LAN and VGA on the back (No DVI)
• SD/MMC Memory Stick/Pro slot and headphone/mic jacks on the front.

Last week I wrapped up an event video project for a client. They wanted ten copies of the movie on DVD. I burned the first two or three with no problem, then the software (Sony DVD Architect Studio 4.0) locked up, or so I thought. Turns out it was looking for the optical drive to no avail. Apparently Windows 7 had eaten it!

To make a long story short, even after re-booting my laptop, the optical drive would intermittently drop out of device manager when I inserted a blank DVD. It’s like the operating system just ate it. Sometimes I could burn two discs before it would happen, sometimes three.

I ended up uninstalling the driver for the burner and letting Windows reinstall it. That seemed to help, but today I needed to simply rip an audio CD. The process goes along fine until the end and then stops without finishing. Sony Acid throws up an error, but Windows Media Player 11 just sits there saying it’s 100% complete, but never actually generates the file. I haven’t found a way around this particular problem yet. I’d love to hear from you if you’ve had a similar problem and found a solution.

On a lighter note, I snagged a pretty nice graphics tablet from Woot.com last week. It’s a Digipro T-8000U. If you haven’t discovered Woot.com take a look. Every once in a while they have what they call a Woot-off and instead of the normal one product per day, they list one product after another as they sell out.

I got this Digipro graphics tablet for under $40 including shipping. I thought it would be a good way to get started with a tablet without breaking the bank. I took it out of the box, plugged it into a USB port and within 30 seconds, Windows 7 had identified it and installed a driver. It did require a re-boot, but after that it works fine. I never even touched the included driver CD. Pretty impressive for an “off-brand’ and somewhat obscure piece of hardware.

I still like Windows 7 for the most part, but if it won’t give back my optical drive, I may have to revert to XP. Let’s hope not!

Brett