My Eken Android Bootloop Fix

I want to keep this a little brief.  My Eken W70 was suffering from a bootloop issue after factory resetting the tablet.  This tablet had gone through a previous update to Jellybean although I suspected that the update was an unofficial one.  So, noting that if I don't fix this, I might as well toss this to the bin, I was emboldened into tinkering it in an attempt to fix it.

Random Thoughts

This edition of Random Thoughts is regarding two things.  First is Assassin's Creed: Director's Cut and the Fast Travel feature.  I had made the mistake of fast travelling from Masyaf to Damascus and wondered of a way to fast travel to Acre.  Apparently, if you look at the map, there are icons for "To Kingdom" which when you leave the map through those points, you'll be asked for the option to fast travel.  This only works after Memory 3.

Second is researching on updating the Eken W70 firmware.  The tablet isn't listed in the Eken site anymore and the firmware update files are all bunched up together in the most confusing manner in their FTP site.  As far as I can tell, the W70 and W70+ are similar tablets but the W70+ has a rear facing camera.  I did some research with the Web Archive and this link to identify the proper firmware.  The correct firmware it seems is: W70-1.5.5-1680-NO-WIN8-1.10.zip and the ftp link isn't included as Eken seems to change ftp IPs all the time.

Here are the instructions for Firmware Updating:

1. Download the firmware file
2. Unzip the RAR file to a folder.
3. Open the zipped folder and copy all content in it to an empty SD or Micro SD card.
4. Turn off your device and then insert the SD or Micro SD card into it.
5. The upgrade process will get started automatically when you turn on your device.
6. When the upgrade is finished, remove the SD or Micro SD card from your device.
7. The device will automatically restart again.

That's it!

Demystifying the network woes

I've noticed that my network is (mis)behaving in pretty much the same way as it did in Ubuntu 9.10.  I've begun digging up some resources to see why it's happening and it looks like a BIOS/firmware issue where the interrupts are not being set correctly by the BIOS.  You can read more about it here and here and here.  The problems described are EXACTLY THE SAME as the ones I'm having.  The question is, which one do I grab for the motherboard DP55WB?

Handy command here:

sudo lshw -class network

This will spit out the UNCLAIMED output.

Bonus:
When my portable hard disk started to spew stupid crap about not being able to mount using ntfs.  I needed to run chkdsk from Windows.  This command was helpful:  chkdsk /f [drive letter]: