Classical Gas: Computers and Internet

Computers can be irritating!

Wed, 14 May 2008 10:57:48 GMT

OK, I guess many of you came to that conclusion a long time ago! The situation is that the new Dell at Chaos Manor is functioning OK after the Raid 1 drama. In fact it seems to a very nice computer, but....

It has Vista of course, which I like. Lots of ways to personalise it, including being able to set a nice display of your pictures as a screen saver. But I have found when I use this the sleep feature doesn't function. That's important as I am one of these people who doesn't switch their computer off, so I rely on "sleep" to make some modest energy savings! Searched all over the net and discovered that's one of the joys of Vista!

My MacBook allows you to use photos from your hard drive as an ever changing desktop. But that doesn't seem available in Vista.

A busy day at Chaos Manor

Wed, 07 May 2008 18:13:09 GMT

The plan had been to take an early morning bike ride. Started biking again yesterday. A nice eight mile route along Bromham ridge and back through Stagsden. All but a couple of miles off road. There was to be no biking this morning though.

It all started to go wrong on Tuesday night when there was a power cut from around 9pm through to the early hours. Restarting the computers, yes there is more than one here now, I immediately noticed the the Raid on the new Dell wasn't initialising.

OK lets talk about Raid. I specified Raid 1 on the new Dell. It has two 750GB hard drives that Mirror each other. So if one goes down you can just carry on working using the one remaining as they are exact copies. Then when you fit a replacement drive it rebuilds the data on the replacement, from the good one, all by itself.

Back to this morning. What to do? Answer panic! Looking at the Disks I could see that both were there, working and apparently OK. call Dell. Lets start with the weather. "It's always Sunny here in Bangalore". OK sarcasm aside I have found Dells Phone Support un-failing helpful. I gave them remote access to the computer and they checked everything and said it was OK.

But no Raid 1! They said that the Hitachi Drives should rebuild themselves and they would ring in two days to see all was well. The computer still worked so lets try. The drives churned away, the disc light flashed and three hours later it initialised the Raid configuration and all seems to be well.

I can only think that the power outage sparked some data loss, Raid 1 recognised it and set to work. nervy time though. I think I will invest in a UPS and a 1 TB USB Drive to provide extra insurance.

No biking tomorrow. I am off to Yorkshire to look at a possible new trials car!!

Its all go with the computers

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 18:11:32 GMT

The Dell seems to work OK. Have spent all day sorting out the office here at Chaos manor so it sits in prime place on my desk. Cables-bloody-cables! have still got the old HP live as there's stacks off stuff on that still to be transferred. The LAN will help with that!

Still can't get the Internet to work on Mike's computer. It's connected to his ISP but will not connect to Explorer - Firefox - Outlook Express or Skype. Pretty much exhausted the possibilities I can come up with so all that's left is a Windows re-install and I have never done one of those!

Computer Problems at Chaos Manor

Sat, 19 Apr 2008 07:40:25 GMT

Sitting here on the throne typing this on my MacBook. However, the main machine here is an HP PC running XP that is the best part of five years old and has been creaking at the seams for a while. Finally took the plunge and ordered a new one (A Dell with Raid 1 etc) and it came yesterday. Took all day to get it up and running but I think I have finally succeeded. Not installed my software yet of course. But we have a working LAN here at Chaos Manor. Thats necessary as I have to keep the old machine because of course my printer doesn't have a USB port and my old scanner won't work with Vista!

Technology Problems

Mon, 24 Dec 2007 11:54:11 GMT

Been a few days of on/off Broadband here at Choas Manor. Last time it happened I swore blind to the ISP it was their end, only to find the router had gone on the blink. So this time everything was checkd here, still no Broadband. Using a dial-up connection I managed to get on the ISP's site to find there was a problem at the local exchange at Oakley. The broadband came on the next morning, then disappeared the next evening and so on and its still a bit flakey.

The moral is that if you have broadband problems, and have a modem so that you can dial up, check out the ISP's service Status and the Status of the local exchange. Although the local exchange link is hosted by my ISP it's publically accessible.

All this assumes youi have a modem and many modern computers, including my new MacBook, don't have one as standard.

Don't you just love computers

Sat, 15 Dec 2007 07:14:33 GMT

I really like using VOIP, the whole idea of using Skype and making free phone calls really appeals. Mike Hayward and I used to use it to talk cars until suddenly there were problems at his end, the mic stopped working. Plugging and unplugging everything didn't do any good so he buys a new Mic, a USB one this time, only to find that didn't work either.

After a bit of a wait I dropped by to see if I could help. First job as always if someone asks me to look at their computer was to clean it up a bit. Get rid of tmp files etc. It booted up quickly but I immediately noticed it was continually accessing the hard drive, even with no programs running. A quick check revealed it only had 440K of memory and it should have been 512.

We opened up the case, took the chip card out and put it firmly back, hoping it was just a contact problem, no result. A quick check on the internet an we saw PC World sold 512K of memory for less that £20. There is a PC World less than a mile away from Mike's so off we go, but unfortunately they were out of stock.

Passing a Maplin on the way out we checked there, they didn't have any but if they did it would have been £45. Pays to shop around!

Hopefully PC world will have a delivery in the next week. Will report back if this cures the Mic problem.

Still no Broadband

Thu, 09 Nov 2006 12:57:07 GMT

Oh Dear, its like being on a desert island. No idea what the problem is and I haven't heard back from the ISP who I have contacted via dial up. Phoned them but the wait time is an hour! Apparantly I have someting new called an "adapative maxdsl product". Well it isn't adapting very well!