Real World Computing
And the winnaah is... Blu-ray!
Swann song
An unexpected email from a PR firm led me to the website of Swann (www.swann.eu.com), which carries a huge range of IP-based security products - webcams, surveillance devices, video recorders, motion detectors and so forth. I was particularly struck by a video camera kit of two outdoor-quality cameras plus a Wi-Fi unit for less than £200, and the DRV4-ProNet four-channel network monitoring system that does motion detection and recording and can be watched over the internet. It's an ideal solution if you want to have your house watched while you're at work, or for a modern take on the baby alarm. These devices have come right down in price and are easy to rig up, too. I might be investigating some of these products soon and will report back here.
Spanner in the Works
A friend from my village plonked her new laptop down on my table and wailed that it was taking five minutes to get to her Ebay page, and five more to actually pay for anything. I promised I'd take a look, while dreading the thought, because often these issues can turn into complete machine rebuilds. Fortunately, the computer was bought for Christmas and I knew it was likely to be clean of viruses. But I still quailed inwardly and was far from looking forward to what I might find.
The machine was clearly sick: its hard disk light was continually flashing and never went off, while trying to click on any icon resulted in so long a delay that the machine was obviously doing something far more important than deigning to interact with my mouse strokes. After 20 minutes, it did calm down and the hard disk light went out, if only for a few seconds.
This was clearly a clean machine, albeit with all the usual OEM preloaded crapware. I tapped into Task Manager and quickly saw the problem, something to do with the Microsoft Works Calendar syncronisation application, which was soaking up 100% of the CPU time. I asked if she ever used Works; she didn't, so I killed this rogue task and uninstalled Works completely, taking my example from Aliens ("I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit, it's the only way to be sure"). The laptop sprang back to life, shut down promptly, then came up to speed with no issues. Sometimes a spring purge is a good idea.
I had a similar problem recently with Stripey White Value, which has two SATA 500GB hard disks in striped set hanging off a motherboard-mounted Intel RAID controller. WSV's exterior construction is as economical as its nickname would suggest: cheap tin and plastic that rattle like a tube-train window. Something in Vista was causing the disks to chatter incessantly, whether I was doing work or it was just sat idling.
In the end, out of pure frustration, I went into the Services panel and nuked the Windows Indexer, after which a reboot was required to finally make it shut up. I still have no idea why it decided it needed to keep rebuilding the index, as the machine had had weeks of idle time in which to create a current one. Okay, now it isn't quite as quick to find things on WSV as it was before, but at least I can now bear to sit next to it again...
