ReSound LiNX Quattro GN C-1 Charger Fix

ReSound LiNX Quattro are a line of bluetooth enabled smart, programmable hearing aids.

One thing NOT smart about these is the design around the ReSound GN model C-1 charger base unit's microUSB charging port.

Shown here on the reverse of the charger, and note the telltale trapezoidal shape of the socket for the microUSB plug at bottom. Based a friend's unit and those on eBay and elsewhere on sale for "parts only" due to having died, I've found a fix at least in cases as I describe here. Their charger one day no longer consistently indicated full charge, and over the next day or so it appeared to stop charging altogether. Upon closer examination I noticed that the cable when plugged into the socket was very loose. 

Using a couple of thin but firm metal spatulas from a set of precision tools geared toward tearing down electronic devices, I carefully pried the clamshell style case apart near the left and right seams, which I found secured with plastic clips. I was startled to find that the little piece of metal shown was just detached and if not for the case free to roam about the circuitboard. 

A bit of research on the microUSB architecture indicated that while that metal sleeve may beyond providing ground not serve any purpose electrically other than as shielding, structurally it is vital to ensure the male microUSB cable mates with the female socket's electrical contacts so that power can flow.

I decided to try to carefully mix and apply a tiny amount of epoxy under and around the area of the metal sleeve using a toothpick. I took care to try to encapsulate parts of the sleeve and the surface of the circuitboard it mates to in order to ensure a given male microUSB cable would once again fit snugly. I allowed the epoxy to cure overnight with the unit sitting level and upright, then carefully plugged the unit into a power adapter for a few hours.

The result? 

Signs of life, the green LEDs shown indicate the base unit is fully charged! Hearing aids placed in the unit's little cubby holes (which convey charge via induction) and the unit's status LEDs along with the hearing aids' own onboard LEDs now indicate active charging. Not bad, taking a "dead" device for some $17 off eBay and returning it to service rather than forking over $250 for one off Amazon, or nearly $400 for an OEM replacement from the manufacturer! 

At least one of their newer models I'm aware of implements USB C. It appears ReSound revised their design with that more uniform rectangular-slash-oval socket shape combined with visibly less empty space surrounding the socket. That clearly deters the kind of torque and play its predecessor suffers with.

While the C-1's fix is very simple, I think thanks to its design the issue could recur. The asymmetric nature of the microUSB socket plus the not quite flush fit of the female socket in the charger's plastic chassis can, over time, and especially with carelessness, allow for potentially enough play to cause the sleeve to detach with this C-1 model. 

Problem solved... for now.

Run Classic MSPaint On a Locked Down Windows 11 PC

My workplace updated the corporate laptop I use with Windows 11.

While it has its quirks, overall it hasn't been disruptively annoying or infuriating so far, just minorly so. 

The taskbar in a distinctly Apple-esque way has the icons horizontally centered by default. The calendar opens only on your primary monitor in a multi-monitor setup (a particularly trivial habit to be forced to break).

My only real (and slight) annoyance, which I address here, is that good old MSPaint has been replaced with a more frills tool, Paint. If accustomed to the old school tool, you may as I did find yourself aggravated that the workflow is a step or few more convoluted for the kind of elementary stuff you might do. 

By elementary, I mean stuff you want to do in the second or few you're accustomed to. Yes, there's the snipping tool, yes, there's Photoshop and Paint.net and myriad others, but no, this is about MSPaint, damn it!

Complicating this is that I lack admin permissions on my work machine. That means installing Classic Paint and pretty much anything else is a no-go. However, I found a workaround.

My first attempt involved trying to use the mspaint.exe executable from a Windows 10 laptop. To make that happen, I took a copy of that file, renamed it to mspaint.txt to avoid triggering any potential email filtering, and emailed that roughly 917KB file to my corporate inbox. 

From there, I saved the file to my Windows 11 machine, then renamed it to change the file extension from TXT to EXE, and tried running it. However, that yielded "Unable to create new document." I know Windows 10's version of mspaint.exe had a few changes since the Windows 7 "era", and likely some dependencies tied to Windows 10 itself, so this wasn't surprising. 

Notably, however, despite Windows 11 being locked down by group policy and antimalware measures, it didn't balk at attempting to start up its older Microsoft-published cousin. Anyway, out of sheer laziness, I then did a google search for web servers with directory browsing enabled using the following criteria:

"Index of /" mspaint.exe

That yielded among others a site down under in Australia somewhere that hadn't bothered to lock down their folder structure hosting an earlier version of the file, this one a mere 335KB or so.

That file I poached and went ahead and uploaded here. Those wishing to verify it's safe can run it past VirusTotal, but as far as Microsoft is concerned, it ran without a hitch.

Count on Microsoft, Inc., or any other corporate entity in IT to inflict the maxim that time marches on upon its users, by periodically and irrevocably changing things up in often annoying, inconvenient, arguably unnecessary ways.

That's perhaps the one constant right behind change itself in the industry today.