Recent Posts

4976

General Software Discussion / Re: WIndows Vista Ultimate ... worth upgrading ... CNET say no!

« Last post by Carol Haynes on January 26, 2007, 05:47 AM »

Er ... wasn't WinXP the ultimate OS that prevented the whole system crashing ?

4977

Living Room / Re: is it me or is it the machine (i'm sorry for even posting this).

« Last post by Carol Haynes on January 26, 2007, 05:36 AM »

Never encountered this with Acronis so I can't really comment on that.

Have you considered it might be a boot sector virus or other malware attacking the active partition? It would account for why the other dual boot was unaffected?

4978

General Software Discussion / Re: WIndows Vista Ultimate ... worth upgrading ... CNET say no!

« Last post by Carol Haynes on January 26, 2007, 05:32 AM »

Let's have a look at the 10 reasons list ...

1. Higher Level of Safety and Security
2. Improved Responsiveness
3. Improved Performance
4. Reliability
5. Enhanced Accessibility
6. The New User Interface, better organization and ease of use
7. The Windows Aero Interface
8. Easier Search and Organization
9. Improvements in the Networking Technology
10. Windows Movie Maker and Windows DVD Maker

I seem to remember that 1-5 were touted as the reason for upgrading to Windows XP - has Windows XP suddenly expired in all these areas. The facts remained that (1) will be compromised in Vista in exactly the same way it already is in XP and require endless patches, (2) & (3) proved illusory in Windows XP and certainly from beta/RC trials Vista seems to decrease in these areas rather than increase! (4) Windows XP was the 'most reliable OS ever' - has it suddenly had a change of heart ?

(6) & (7) yeah right - resource hogs both and almost everyone that has tried Vista agrees that the it certainly isn't better organised and easier to use - generally you are on a real mission to find any of the settings in Vista and when you do find the one you are looking for you seem to have to look for other bits and pieces hidden in obscure and unrelated corners (wireless networking that doesn't install during start up is a case in point).

(9) maybe true (don't know) but if your network already works properly in XP why would this be a deciding factor?

(10) Yeah right - just like Windows Movie Maker in XP - that was a real big winner wasn't it? You can bet your life if they were about to include something half decent they would be back in court before you could even say anti-trust.


The other reasons apparently  touted are IE 7 and WMP 11 - well whoopdy-do you can already have these in XP so why do you need Vista ?

4979

General Software Discussion / WIndows Vista Ultimate ... worth upgrading ... CNET say no!

« Last post by Carol Haynes on January 26, 2007, 04:13 AM »

Interesting article and video intro from CNET at

http://reviews.cnet....603.html?tag=nl.e501

I have to say what they conclude seems pretty much like common sense to me - Vista isn't finished and lots of functions won't work properly until SP1 is released for it late 2007. Add to that there seems to be little added over Windows XP other than DX10 and a surface gloss.

Given the potential performance hit on existing hardware (or the cost of upgrading hardware) is it worth upgrading? Personally I agree with CNET and I won't be any time soon.

What do you think ...

[edited to attach image for blogging]

4980

Living Room / Re: is it me or is it the machine (i'm sorry for even posting this).

« Last post by Carol Haynes on January 26, 2007, 03:52 AM »

i think (near) daily backups of my data is a habit i need to take up. i'd consider using linux if i felt adventurous but it's such a paradigm shift that i'm not ready for it yet (ever?). i've certainly not fixed the problem - merely chosen to pretend it never happened.

-nudone (January 26, 2007, 03:08 AM)

Simplest solution is to set up Acronis to schedule a daily incremental backup. If you leave your computer on 24/7 just set it to run in the middle of the night. Another solution is to do a daily differential backup that way you only need to retain the original backup and a small set of differential backups. Every month or so (as the differential chunks grow in size) do a fresh full backup and then add differentials from there again. If you have a large enough spare hard disc you can easily automate all this and not have to think about it at all.

4981

Living Room / Re: is it me or is it the machine (i'm sorry for even posting this).

« Last post by Carol Haynes on January 25, 2007, 06:07 PM »

Glad you have everything working again ... dare I say the magic words "Daily Incremental Backups" 

4982

Living Room / Re: is it me or is it the machine (i'm sorry for even posting this).

« Last post by Carol Haynes on January 24, 2007, 01:27 PM »

fodder, Carol - Would the chkdisk even "see" these sectors since they were in the "Unmovable Files" area of the drive.  I thought chkdisk only checked the data area?

-Farmsteader (January 24, 2007, 12:30 PM)

If you do an offline chkdsk you can check the whole disk (including the pafefil.sys and hivberfil.sys files which can't be checked when they are in use). Bad blocks in the page file can have pretty odd random events.

If you have multiple installations you can speed up offline chkdsk activity by running it from a different installation and using the /x switch.

4983

Living Room / Re: is it me or is it the machine (i'm sorry for even posting this).

« Last post by Carol Haynes on January 24, 2007, 10:57 AM »

then several chkdsk scans run on it - some of which worked perfectly some caused the machine to reboot.

-nudone (January 24, 2007, 09:49 AM)

Ah ... that looks strange. Why should chkdsk cause your system to spontaneously reboot EVER?

Sounds more and more to me like a memory issue or a heat/power issue.

Run MEMTEST+ as we suggested tonight but also check temperatures and also check the recommended PSU capacity for all the hardware you have. I was surprised to find a system I recently built for a friend had a mobo manufacturer's recommendation of a minimum of 450W, 600W for dual crossfire video cards and even higher for lots of memory.

All these manufacturers keep wittering on about low power consumption and cool running systems - strikes me that most systems are running a lot hotter these days and consume almost 4x the power systems did 5 years ago. I still have a Pentium III / 1Gb system that runs on a 160W PSU and doesn't need any case fans to run stable.

4984

Living Room / Re: is it me or is it the machine (i'm sorry for even posting this).

« Last post by Carol Haynes on January 24, 2007, 09:34 AM »

??? Disc errors on the RAID partitions ? Possible? They are a bugger to track down but I did have my old PC built on the internal RAID interface at one time and it caused no end of headaches with data corruption. Run CHKDSK C: /R /V /X on your problem system and your data partitions.
 
I also had lots of problems on my old system with memory problems (which also caused data corruption) - these are a real pain to track down and had random symptoms that only occured rarely - best thing is to leave MEMTEST+ running over night to give the memory a hard workout.

4985

Living Room / Re: OK - lets get to know each other... who are you, what do you do, where from?

« Last post by Carol Haynes on January 24, 2007, 07:26 AM »

Our outdoor sports are now limited to the long and adventurous trek from the car door to the adjacent pub or cafe.

-zxcvbn (January 24, 2007, 05:41 AM)

Tell me about it - I don't often get as far as the car door these days!

4986

Living Room / Re: is it me or is it the machine (i'm sorry for even posting this).

« Last post by Carol Haynes on January 24, 2007, 07:23 AM »

Have you checked the system error logs? Sometimes very odd things happen when you get a registry corruption and windows reverts to an earlier version (usually without telling you) !

4987

Living Room / Re: OK - lets get to know each other... who are you, what do you do, where from?

« Last post by Carol Haynes on January 23, 2007, 06:20 PM »

Well, hallo from Stockton-on-Tees in NE England.  I am just carrying out my assignments as tasked.

-zxcvbn (January 23, 2007, 05:43 PM)

Welcome zxvbn .... strange name but hey ...

Actually we are practically neighbours (in the scale of DC.com) as I only live down the road in Wensleydale and used to commu8te to Stockton to work !

4988

Developer's Corner / Re: Esoteric Programming Languages

« Last post by Carol Haynes on January 23, 2007, 09:49 AM »

The language "Whenever" just about sums up my attitude (at the moment - if I can be bothered to have an attitude).

I love the fact the someone has actually bothered to write an interpreter for the language too the encompasses the design principles of slowing down until it gives up

4989

Finished Programs / Re: IDEA: Replacement Power Options applet

« Last post by Carol Haynes on January 21, 2007, 05:36 AM »

Thanks I'll give it a go.

No I am just running 32 bit Windows XP Pro natively.

4990

General Software Discussion / Re: Good Freeware Video Editor?

« Last post by Carol Haynes on January 20, 2007, 12:56 PM »

TMPGEnc DVD Author 2 does not recode and only accepts DVD conformant files. If you need to recode than TMPGEnc XPress does a good job and TMPGEnc MPEG Editor does a good job at editing video files without forcing recoding (so you can delete ads etc easily without degrading the video).

Sony's DVD Architect 2 only recodes your video when it absolutely has to (it doesn't if videos are already DVD compatible formats).

4991

Finished Programs / Re: IDEA: Replacement Power Options applet

« Last post by Carol Haynes on January 20, 2007, 09:59 AM »

I think that is pretty much what the script does (see the MAKENOISE subroutine) except that I think it is done by keyboard activity rather than mouse.

Trouble is it doesn't seem to work for me.

4992

Finished Programs / Re: IDEA: Replacement Power Options applet

« Last post by Carol Haynes on January 20, 2007, 05:59 AM »

Nope - changed it to 1 and it made no difference.

Here is my Power Options applet:



The battery options are because I have a USB UPS which WinXP recognises as a battery.

4993

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Giveaway of the Day - HDDlife for Notebooks - Using your notebook on your bed ?

« Last post by Carol Haynes on January 19, 2007, 06:17 PM »

Hopefully they have fixed the issue now (it was a while ago that I used the app) but I found drive temps with ATA Caviar drives very unreliable.

4994

Finished Programs / Re: IDEA: Replacement Power Options applet

« Last post by Carol Haynes on January 19, 2007, 06:15 PM »

I haven't left it long enough to see if it hibernates but it still turns off the screen and hard discs (set up in Power Options Applet), which it shouldn't do, so I suspect it will still hibernate at the appropriate time.

4995

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Giveaway of the Day - HDDlife for Notebooks - Using your notebook on your bed ?

« Last post by Carol Haynes on January 19, 2007, 10:20 AM »

Be warned though I bought a copy ages ago and found it doesn't word well with some WD drives - it reports random temperatures. When I reported the problem to them HDDLife support blamed the WD implementation of SMART - seems unlikely as other monitors (such as SpeedFan) don't seem to give false readings.

4996

Finished Programs / Re: IDEA: Replacement Power Options applet

« Last post by Carol Haynes on January 19, 2007, 09:11 AM »

Right it allows my computer to go to sleep (and hibernate after a couple of hours) - the proof of the pudding will be to see what happens when I load the CPU for a long period - I'll try that tomorrow.

-Carol Haynes (January 18, 2007, 06:03 PM)

Hmmm ... the pudding just burst.

To keep my system busy I ran a stress tester (the nVidia stress test which stresses most system components in a continuous loop) for 2 hours but LowToSleep didn't manage to keep the computer awake ? CPU usage was continuously high throughout.

4997

Finished Programs / Re: IDEA: Replacement Power Options applet

« Last post by Carol Haynes on January 18, 2007, 06:03 PM »

Right it allows my computer to go to sleep (and hibernate after a couple of hours) - the proof of the pudding will be to see what happens when I load the CPU for a long period - I'll try that tomorrow.

4998

General Software Discussion / Re: Good Freeware Video Editor?

« Last post by Carol Haynes on January 18, 2007, 06:00 PM »

I'm with Carol on this. You get what you pay for in this area.

While Sonic basically defines the DVD authoring standard  their consumer level DVD authoring tools don't quite measure up (or at least they didn't last I checked) and you're better off getting the DVD authoring software from MediaChance, which is cheaper and better.

But if you're just doing stuff for home, it doesn't matter all that much.

Vegas and Premiere are very good and still affordable, all things considered. Many NLE packages can run you into the 10's of thousands of dollars.

-Renegade (January 18, 2007, 04:00 PM)

Actually I disagree - I think Sony's DVD Architect v. 2 is pretty good and the bundle with Vegas is expensive (for a home user) but nevertheless good quality.

Having said that I mostly author DVDs using TMPGEnc DVD Author. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles but you can do loads of stuff in a very quick and simple way. I only resort to DVD Architect if I want more control over what I am doing.

I tried MediaChance but object to the need to splash out more money to be able to use Dolby sound and I found their user interface not very intuitive and the documentation not as good as Sony's.

The only thing I would say is that for any of these applications try to avoid producing Video or Audio that needs recoding in the application. I have had strange glitches with poor sound sync with all of them but only when things need to be recoded on the fly.

4999

Finished Programs / Re: IDEA: Replacement Power Options applet

« Last post by Carol Haynes on January 18, 2007, 11:18 AM »

Ah ! Now that seems to work for me (at least for reporting CPU usage). Thanks that's great.

I'll try it out now for allowing sleeping on sustained low CPU usage.

5000

Finished Programs / Re: IDEA: Replacement Power Options applet

« Last post by Carol Haynes on January 18, 2007, 06:41 AM »

Scratches head .... yes I think I understand that ...