Archive for June, 2008

Jun 25

A cure for phone interference

This should be filed under “why did I not know this before”.

Now as everybody knows, mobile phones constantly chatter to the network. So when you place your phone near some speakers, you can hear this happening.

Indeed this sort of interference can happen in all sorts of situations affecting televisions, speakers, wired phones and so on.

So in my home office I always had to be careful where I placed my phone because with 2 sets of speakers in the room, the interference was a problem. More often than not, during the day I would just turn my speakers off.

But then it happened. Purely by accident I found something that stopped my phone interfering with my speakers (and everything else in the room)

Jun 16

And then it was gone

Remember not so long ago I was trying to decide if Vista should stay or go?

Well it looks like it has made it’s own decisions and this evening rebooted itself into an irrecoverable state claiming upon reboot that the ATA driver was missing which means no hard disks!

But hang on. My recent backups have all been made using Vistas own backup feature so will not simply restore onto an XP machine. But not a problem because I can just access said backups from my desktop Vista machine.

Oh no.

It looks like even though Vista has been reporting successful backups each evening, they are actually corrupt.

So now we need to gain access to the drive that will not boot. But also remember that this drive is protected using BitLocker! Things are about to get interesting.

Jun 11

ZyXEL PowerLine HomePlug AV

Over the last few weeks I have been trying to get organised at home and one thing that is really bugging me is the way that my data is just scattered everywhere.

So I have spent some time rebuilding my home server to run Windows Server 2008 and it now runs really well with about 1TB of available storage. The main purpose of this machine is as a place to backup all data from multiple machines.

My home was built 2 years ago and as such is very energy efficient which is great in the winter but in the hot weather, my home office can get very hot very quickly. Throw in a server with that amount of spinning disks and my office goes from cool and quiet to noisy and hot.

Turning the server off is far from ideal so I have been looking to give it a new home somewhere else in the house. Eventually we found a hidden corner in the dining room where it is out of site and to be fair, this room is not used daily the server will be well out of the way of day to day household traffic.

But the problem came when I needed to network my office to the server. My office is upstairs at one side of the house and the dining room is downstairs in the exact opposite corner. As such, getting more than about 6mbits from a wireless connection is a challenge and a non starter.

Running cable is also not really an option. Sure it would be fast and secure but it would involve me lifting the floor in at least 5 rooms and that would make an awful mess.

So what about PowerLine networking? I have read a lot about this over the years and the reviews of the latest 200mbits kit are positive so £70 later I have everything I need to connect my office to my dining room.

Jun 10

When small is too big

Kevin over at jkOnTheRun is currently taking his web-only challenge. His goal to see how long he can go without using a full client application on his Mac or his UMPC (Ultra Mobile PC).

Now there have been a large number of UMPC devices launched in the last few months starting with the Asus EeePC. Of course these devices to date are quite limited in performance but this compromise is accepted as the pay back is the portability and low cost.

But we are now seeing the manufacturers trying to squeeze more and more power out of these devices but do we really need it?

Jun 8

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Should it stay or should it go? Vista Again

You may recall in my last post how I had had big problems with trying to get Vista onto my Dell D630 laptop. But over the 4 day bank holiday weekend I invested some serious one on one time to this with no distractions or real work to worry about.

In the end switching off Windows Search cleared up all the event log errors. As simple as that so I now have a laptop running Vista Enterprise at speed and with all the software I need.

So all is well.

Or is it?