If you live in a desert climate, air cooling sucks and if the dust is not dealt with at regular intervals things fail quickly. First dust starts to accumulate on the fan blades (unevenly) putting it out of balance thus placing greater strain on its barrings. Meanwhile, intel's ingenious design of their retail cooling fan and heatsink ends up being clogged with dust. The ambient temperature inside the chassis begins to increase as the chassis fan and PSU fans have now ceased, leaving only the higher power cpu fan spinning faster in vain packing the dust more tightly in an increasingly overheating heatsink. With no airflow coming into the chassis, the first thing that usually goes is the HDD. And is usually the first time a service call is generated from a user.
In my server closets I buy my own chassis with an easy to remove air filter on the front of each chassis, about every month I take it to the sink rinse it out, shake off the excess water and put it back. The closets have their own independent AC and room monitor with alerting sophisticated enough if for some reason the AC quit Servers would begin treating it like a power failure and begin shutdowns.
But for the poor PCs sitting on the floor of 100s of users all working as digital air filters. Unless regular maintenance is done (the dust storm blow job with the air compressor) they crash within 6 months to 1 year.
I really like the idea of liquid cooling. Just leaving a rig that I'm setting up for some running 24/7 with 2 8800GTX, QX9770, 2 Seagate 1TB, 3, WD 150 Raptor, evga 680i mobo, Tagen 1100W PSU 2 19" Dell 2007WFP in portiat mode sandwiching their 30" model in the middle. Compared to last year, my electricity bill increased by 40% for this month My Kill-A-Watt reader registered an average 600W, but the heat would activate the main HVAC in my house much more often. All in all to run this rig costs close to $100 per month in energy costs. If I could easily get that heat outside of the home, then I would only be expending 600W for the computer and saving 3KW each time the HVAC kicks on.
Another thing, the Cooler Master CMStacker is a POS. At least in the desert, it is nothing more than a dust storm in a box. So far I am using a great quality filtered rackmount chassis, but he wants CM with pretty lights lights. I'll show him where to the canned air is in costco and how to make small dust storms on his front porch every month.
Sorry for not having much of a point, my ambien as begun to kick in and will be typing in my sleep soon.
All the more reason to put a freeze on all of 3B reporting agencies. Since Nov 1 2007, everyone is entitled to it. It cost $10 for each credit reporting agency and well worth it. Unlike LifeLock which only puts a fraud alert on your credit reports every 90 days (you could do this yourself for free), a freeze is exactly that. No accounts can be opened without a pin number given to you by the one of the 3 Bs. Each agency is different, some require 3 days to thaw your report, while others allow you to specify which creditors you want to allow and for how long. One benefit is when car shopping you don't have the pressure from the sales people, it is very easy to walk out the dealership once they try to look up your credit score. They know they will not be selling you a car tonight, that you will have to come back later with a pin.
I don't think the operators have the knowhow, nor the means to make changes to such a complex image recording system. At the very least they could keep a log book and enter GPS coordinates of things that are this obvious. Then whoever extracts, converts, publishes should be responsible to check the logs and publish accordingly.
The MSM as a whole are illegally contributing to campaigns IMO. They are failing their journalistic standards and there is wide proof of it all over the net. 100s of millions of free airtime have been given to 'front runners' and $0 given to the largest grass-roots/net-roots campaign in history.
If journalistic integrity is compromised then these news organizations should be sued under the McCain/Feingold act for illegal campaign contributions.
Why can't local governments have more sway in what these corps do? If the federal government steps out of control, wouldn't it be easier to get local governments to set rules at the state and city level? Enough petitions get signed against Comcast for their bandwidth limiting, goes to the city's or state's PUC and tells Comcast to knock it off or leave our city. They either fix it, or another competitor steps in.
I really think that more can be done locally, much more efficiently than at the federal level. One example was my cable company overcharging me, I sent an email to the devision in my city government that regulates the cable company and had the problem solved in a week.
I really can't think of one federal program that actually does anything more efficiently than local governments, with exception to the IRS.
I just wished that the super drive had a way to work on a PC. Even if it had to have a tiny Nokia power port on it to make up for the needed power. I'd still buy it in a heartbeat.
I'm wondering how complicated this thing really is. Can't I just get a bicycle helmet and wire 1000 ultra bright ir LEDs and 3 cooling fans too? I would love to see more plans on this device so I can make my own. I've been fighting anxiety for years and am willing to try alternative remedies as all of the medical ones are failing. I know it is intended for Alz but it also mentioned anxiety. Screw the FDA and the trials. If the FDA existed when penicillin was invented it would never have been approved.
I would also love to see how this sleep helmet works. I hate waiting for trials too. At this point I'm willing to try anything too.
I service 10 to 15 small businesses each with 10-30 computers. When I have my meeting with them I suggest ways to save them money. One of them is powering off computers at night, and using the builtin power save features. Most users are annoyed with the 20 minute default so I compromise. I set it to 90. This is so when an employee returns from lunch their computer is still running and they are none the wiser and have no reason to panic. If they forget to turn it off at night, the screen and hdd spin down at 90 minutes and the computer goes to standby 30 minutes later. I have experimented with hibernation, but found that every once in a while a computer will go in to a coma, so for now I don't implement it. For computers that have no specific user (shared) I schedule a task to run at 7pm shutdown.exe -f -s -t 900 -c "Nightly shutdown has begun. blah blah blah" Then have the server send a magic packet to them in the morning right before people begin to show up. I have not had a single complaint.
In desert climates such as AZ there are more benefits than just saving power. These mid and mini tower computers turn into hightech digital air filters and ingest a lot of dust. Having them go into standby or power off lessens the dust storm when doing quarterly maintenance with the air compressor.
Last time I checked mp3sparks(allofmp3 rebranded) still offers flac and any other imaginable format. Yes the FLAC costs more, but there are times out of convenience that I will purchase an entire CD in FLAC that actually costs as much if note more than a real CD. For the most part I am satisfied with WMA9 192. Seems on par with AAC 192 and MP3 256. I would go ogg, but it doesn't natively play on any of my mp3 players.
Not to mention the artifacts. Digital TV in its current state sucks. Yes the colors are more vivid, but the picture looks like a badly encoded youtube video at times. Hooked up Cox digital cable to a new Sharp HDTV for a family member and I couldn't believe the artifacts and distortions. I know it has to do with bandwidth allocation and encoding. The premium channels look great, but the local channels are sh*t.
Also, who says the FCC won't push it back another 2 years like they've done the last few times this alarm was raised?
There was a time that you could get Vista Home 'downgraded' to XP MCE 2005. I've done it once, but no dice on further attempts. Just for fun I tried to get Gateway to ship me a working XP Product key sticker because the Vista one was defective. Didn't work either.
I think he is referring to when you take a crashed vista HDD and connect it to another PC to copy off your data. I've tried this with no success. You cannot gain access to the users folder, even when taking ownership. Access Denied.
# Someone saying that the exact same thing happened with XP, and people will have to change over the next Holiday season. Except XP actually worked and ran much better on the existing hardware then. This was when the 1GHz barrier was just broken, and I remember XP running so much faster on my PIII 800 than my friends brand new P4 1.4GHz CPU. It even ran ok on 350MHz PIII for grandma's computer. XP was and still is a first class OS IMO compared to what was before it, 9x, ME. 2000 was great for business, but for the home user XP was first class.
Vista is like a bad sequel to a great movie: Alien = Win2000 Aliens = Win XP Alien III = Windows Vista
The Terminator = Win2000 Terminator II = XP Terminator III = Vista
I'm sure you guys can think of 100s more.:)
Put Vista on any hardware made last year and it sucks. You could not say the same for XP at the time.
Your question is missing some important details that could help give you better answers. Such as how far away are you from any area that can get broadband? I've heard of people making 802.11 waveguide repeaters out of coffee cans and were able to power them using some PV solar cells and rechargeable batteries. If you have good line of sight, in a rural area you _may_ get 1 mile or more per repeater.
Of course this creates lots of links in the chain of potential failures, but if build good to withstand the environment when it works it could be a good thing, else fall back on your dial-up.
This is assuming that you live close enough to civilization that has BB and someone there is willing to allow you to subscribe an account on their property and install some goofy looking hardware.
I'm sure most on this forum will disagree with my post, but it is a real attempt to answer the question. The moral questions of this can be debated endlessly, but here goes...
A consultant by trade, I had one of my clients ask the same question and gave them the same answer. But offered the best solution I could come up with. Here is what I did. Setup a small PC running Kerio Winroute Firewall with the Content Filter option. Very easy to setup and configure, and uses the best filter IMO. But expect to pay, Firewall is $499, and the content filter add-on is $249, add this together plus the cost of a small pc. Also keep in mind that the filter will have to be renewed yearly at about $149/yr. Another cool feature you can add on is McAfee AV scanning all network traffic.
Locked it inside a cabinet along with the cable modem. (be sure it is a low power PC, Sempron or Celeron that can tolerate the lack of ventilation, it only needs 256MB ram and the lowest powered low-end cpu you can find. The new run-cool WD HDDS are a plus here too. This prevents bypassing the firewall by physically connecting the pc to the cable modem.
Set the filter to block: Erotic/Sex Pornography Extreme or whatever else you want. Since it is a corporate firewall, there are dozens of other categories to block.
Turn on all http logging and share the log folder as read only so everyone in the family has access to the logs. Trained mom and dad what to look for in the logs, and also showed it to their kids. Kids knowing that anyone can see what pages they have been to keeps them from searching for 'naughty' things.
Even with all of these settings, I would say it is only 80% effective at blocking porn. But the logs are untouchable, revealing, and can be viewed by anyone in the family.
Granted most teens will find a way around this, such as finding an open WiFi in their neighborhood, or goto their friends house. But at least it is was a way for parents to control their own internet.
I don't 100% agree with this, when I was a teen I enjoyed privacy and trust from my parents. My parents talked with me about these things and we had a mutual trust. No filter on the planet will replace good parenting IMO. But I can see the need for such measures in some situations, but that can be debated forever as well.
I can't wait for the day Cox pisses at me over doing 300GB+ a month on my connection though. It's a more pricey business account, but I know they'll do it eventually. Speaking of their business accounts, I have their business account setup and they do not restrict anything, no blocked ports, no traffic shaping, etc, and no limits, for real. But it is $249/month. Still alot cheaper and faster than a T1. The static IPs are a plus too, and not listed in the PBLs so you can run a real mail server. If you are in the Phoenix area, I doubt you will run into any real problems. Cox has much more bandwidth capacity here than they advertise because of all that fiber they ran in the early 90s. When it is profitable for them to do so, they will increase it before they degrade it. I'm sure some of the geeks over there are already testing DOCSIS 3.0 in Paradise Valley somewhere. They seem to get the good stuff first.
That's odd. I go to https://mail.google.com/ and at no time during the login process do I ever see the address bar go from yellow to white. Are you sure it still works the way you say? Or is it sending something unencrypted so fast that I'm just not noticing (which would be kind of worrying). When I goto www.gmail.com the sign in screen is secure. It actually gets redirected to https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin After signing in, it reverts back to http://mail.google.com/mail at which point I add the 's' to the http to go secure mode. If I leave my browser window open, sign out, and sign back in, it remains secure. But after closing and reopening the browser the same as I mentioned above happens.
The funny thing is, gmail offers the ability to sign-in securely, but not an option to keep it SSL throughout the entire session. It works when you manually change the http to https in the url after signed in, but there is still brief moment of unsecured traffic during this process.
It just so happens that today I successfully 'Downgraded' Vista Home Basic that came pre-installed on an HP Pavilion pv9000 to Windows XP Media Center 2005.
Here was the scenario: Vista kept crashing constantly when connected to a WPA protected wifi, but worked ok with WEP or no security. No driver support for the existing (perfectly working) HP Photosmart 1215 No driver support for the existing (also perfectly working) HP Scanjet 5470c
I called 1-800-Microso and after getting lost in their phone menu I hit 0 and was connected to someone with a strange accent. I proceeded to tell the rep my intention of exchanging the Vista product key for MCE and that Vista absolutely doesn't work in the environment I need it to. I wish I would have recorded the 35 minute conversation. It was like pulling teeth and many of his responses were laughable. But my persistence, and having the correct answers to his scripted questions to force his script into a loop many times got me what I wanted. For example, I was told that it was impossible to remove Vista from the laptop. I explained I knew what hard drives were and how to delete partitions. I was then told that my media could not successfully install on this laptop because the product key has already been used. I explained that is the reason for my call (this generated many loops). He seemed annoyed and asked me for the tiny numbers on inner ring of the CD, then to put in the disc to prove that it won't install (perhaps thinking that I wouldn't) I said it's booting the XP setup now. Should I install it? He says go ahead. He needed me to repeat every action and step during this process, I had to tell him what % the coping process was on constantly. But after wiping out my partition and getting the installation to the product information screen he read me off a new XP MCE 2005 key.
My suggestion to anyone that wants to try this, is keep your cool. Know that they are following a script and that you can easily put them in to loop and actually make them think. Stay within the bounds of the script until you achieve your result. You can get annoyed, but don't get angry.
Also, this particular laptop has the Conexant HD audio in which no XP driver is offered by HP (or Toshiba) I did find this post to a forum about a similar problem with a Toshiba very helpful.
It is interesting to report that XP MCE runs so much faster and reliably that Vista on this PC.
A cheap 3.1MP consumer digital camera for under $100 can do 2048x1536. Now, I agree the real purpose-built security cameras have their place in their 0.6MP glory, but having a 3-7MP camera snap a photo every time something moves could yield a whole heck of a lot more in detail. Might actually get the bad guys caught. Hook it up to a motion sensor, enable the flash, cue up some swanky techno mp3s, then let the burglars have a disco or rave while they rob your place. The more cheap camera's the better!
Do your cameras do this? And can I do it for less than $500 and yield twenty-seven 8 by 10 colored glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explainin' what each one was? I would like to see some links, cause google isn't turning them up.
Not only will you gain more respect in the long run, you will have less to regret later on. I am the IT guy for several small businesses in my area. On a few occasions I am asked to install software beyond what is licensed. I explain to them very politely but firmly that it is illegal to do so and that if I did, would they trust a criminal with their data? Works every time. On one occasion one client hired someone else to 'save money' but ended up costing them way more than they bargained for. So who did they trust when looking for someone to trust with their technology?
Slashdot Mirror
If you live in a desert climate, air cooling sucks and if the dust is not dealt with at regular intervals things fail quickly. First dust starts to accumulate on the fan blades (unevenly) putting it out of balance thus placing greater strain on its barrings. Meanwhile, intel's ingenious design of their retail cooling fan and heatsink ends up being clogged with dust. The ambient temperature inside the chassis begins to increase as the chassis fan and PSU fans have now ceased, leaving only the higher power cpu fan spinning faster in vain packing the dust more tightly in an increasingly overheating heatsink. With no airflow coming into the chassis, the first thing that usually goes is the HDD. And is usually the first time a service call is generated from a user.
In my server closets I buy my own chassis with an easy to remove air filter on the front of each chassis, about every month I take it to the sink rinse it out, shake off the excess water and put it back. The closets have their own independent AC and room monitor with alerting sophisticated enough if for some reason the AC quit Servers would begin treating it like a power failure and begin shutdowns.
But for the poor PCs sitting on the floor of 100s of users all working as digital air filters. Unless regular maintenance is done (the dust storm blow job with the air compressor) they crash within 6 months to 1 year.
I really like the idea of liquid cooling. Just leaving a rig that I'm setting up for some running 24/7 with 2 8800GTX, QX9770, 2 Seagate 1TB, 3, WD 150 Raptor, evga 680i mobo, Tagen 1100W PSU 2 19" Dell 2007WFP in portiat mode sandwiching their 30" model in the middle.
Compared to last year, my electricity bill increased by 40% for this month My Kill-A-Watt reader registered an average 600W, but the heat would activate the main HVAC in my house much more often. All in all to run this rig costs close to $100 per month in energy costs.
If I could easily get that heat outside of the home, then I would only be expending 600W for the computer and saving 3KW each time the HVAC kicks on.
Another thing, the Cooler Master CMStacker is a POS. At least in the desert, it is nothing more than a dust storm in a box. So far I am using a great quality filtered rackmount chassis, but he wants CM with pretty lights lights. I'll show him where to the canned air is in costco and how to make small dust storms on his front porch every month.
Sorry for not having much of a point, my ambien as begun to kick in and will be typing in my sleep soon.
All the more reason to put a freeze on all of 3B reporting agencies. Since Nov 1 2007, everyone is entitled to it.
It cost $10 for each credit reporting agency and well worth it. Unlike LifeLock which only puts a fraud alert on your credit reports every 90 days (you could do this yourself for free), a freeze is exactly that. No accounts can be opened without a pin number given to you by the one of the 3 Bs. Each agency is different, some require 3 days to thaw your report, while others allow you to specify which creditors you want to allow and for how long.
One benefit is when car shopping you don't have the pressure from the sales people, it is very easy to walk out the dealership once they try to look up your credit score. They know they will not be selling you a car tonight, that you will have to come back later with a pin.
I don't think the operators have the knowhow, nor the means to make changes to such a complex image recording system. At the very least they could keep a log book and enter GPS coordinates of things that are this obvious. Then whoever extracts, converts, publishes should be responsible to check the logs and publish accordingly.
The MSM as a whole are illegally contributing to campaigns IMO.
They are failing their journalistic standards and there is wide proof of it all over the net.
100s of millions of free airtime have been given to 'front runners' and $0 given to the largest grass-roots/net-roots campaign in history.
If journalistic integrity is compromised then these news organizations should be sued under the McCain/Feingold act for illegal campaign contributions.
Why can't local governments have more sway in what these corps do? If the federal government steps out of control, wouldn't it be easier to get local governments to set rules at the state and city level?
Enough petitions get signed against Comcast for their bandwidth limiting, goes to the city's or state's PUC and tells Comcast to knock it off or leave our city. They either fix it, or another competitor steps in.
I really think that more can be done locally, much more efficiently than at the federal level.
One example was my cable company overcharging me, I sent an email to the devision in my city government that regulates the cable company and had the problem solved in a week.
I really can't think of one federal program that actually does anything more efficiently than local governments, with exception to the IRS.
So yeah, Ron Paul gets my vote.
I just wished that the super drive had a way to work on a PC. Even if it had to have a tiny Nokia power port on it to make up for the needed power. I'd still buy it in a heartbeat.
I'm wondering how complicated this thing really is. Can't I just get a bicycle helmet and wire 1000 ultra bright ir LEDs and 3 cooling fans too? I would love to see more plans on this device so I can make my own. I've been fighting anxiety for years and am willing to try alternative remedies as all of the medical ones are failing. I know it is intended for Alz but it also mentioned anxiety. Screw the FDA and the trials. If the FDA existed when penicillin was invented it would never have been approved.
I would also love to see how this sleep helmet works.
I hate waiting for trials too. At this point I'm willing to try anything too.
I service 10 to 15 small businesses each with 10-30 computers. When I have my meeting with them I suggest ways to save them money. One of them is powering off computers at night, and using the builtin power save features. Most users are annoyed with the 20 minute default so I compromise. I set it to 90. This is so when an employee returns from lunch their computer is still running and they are none the wiser and have no reason to panic. If they forget to turn it off at night, the screen and hdd spin down at 90 minutes and the computer goes to standby 30 minutes later. I have experimented with hibernation, but found that every once in a while a computer will go in to a coma, so for now I don't implement it.
For computers that have no specific user (shared) I schedule a task to run at 7pm shutdown.exe -f -s -t 900 -c "Nightly shutdown has begun. blah blah blah"
Then have the server send a magic packet to them in the morning right before people begin to show up.
I have not had a single complaint.
In desert climates such as AZ there are more benefits than just saving power. These mid and mini tower computers turn into hightech digital air filters and ingest a lot of dust. Having them go into standby or power off lessens the dust storm when doing quarterly maintenance with the air compressor.
Last time I checked mp3sparks(allofmp3 rebranded) still offers flac and any other imaginable format. Yes the FLAC costs more, but there are times out of convenience that I will purchase an entire CD in FLAC that actually costs as much if note more than a real CD.
For the most part I am satisfied with WMA9 192. Seems on par with AAC 192 and MP3 256. I would go ogg, but it doesn't natively play on any of my mp3 players.
Not to mention the artifacts.
Digital TV in its current state sucks. Yes the colors are more vivid, but the picture looks like a badly encoded youtube video at times.
Hooked up Cox digital cable to a new Sharp HDTV for a family member and I couldn't believe the artifacts and distortions. I know it has to do with bandwidth allocation and encoding. The premium channels look great, but the local channels are sh*t.
Also, who says the FCC won't push it back another 2 years like they've done the last few times this alarm was raised?
There was a time that you could get Vista Home 'downgraded' to XP MCE 2005.
I've done it once, but no dice on further attempts.
Just for fun I tried to get Gateway to ship me a working XP Product key sticker because the Vista one was defective. Didn't work either.
I think he is referring to when you take a crashed vista HDD and connect it to another PC to copy off your data.
I've tried this with no success. You cannot gain access to the users folder, even when taking ownership. Access Denied.
Don't forget those piston return springs, keeps your engine running smooth.
XP was and still is a first class OS IMO compared to what was before it, 9x, ME. 2000 was great for business, but for the home user XP was first class.
Vista is like a bad sequel to a great movie:
Alien = Win2000
Aliens = Win XP
Alien III = Windows Vista
The Terminator = Win2000
Terminator II = XP
Terminator III = Vista
I'm sure you guys can think of 100s more.
Put Vista on any hardware made last year and it sucks. You could not say the same for XP at the time.
Your question is missing some important details that could help give you better answers. Such as how far away are you from any area that can get broadband?
I've heard of people making 802.11 waveguide repeaters out of coffee cans and were able to power them using some PV solar cells and rechargeable batteries.
If you have good line of sight, in a rural area you _may_ get 1 mile or more per repeater.
Of course this creates lots of links in the chain of potential failures, but if build good to withstand the environment when it works it could be a good thing, else fall back on your dial-up.
This is assuming that you live close enough to civilization that has BB and someone there is willing to allow you to subscribe an account on their property and install some goofy looking hardware.
I'm sure most on this forum will disagree with my post, but it is a real attempt to answer the question. The moral questions of this can be debated endlessly, but here goes...
A consultant by trade, I had one of my clients ask the same question and gave them the same answer. But offered the best solution I could come up with.
Here is what I did. Setup a small PC running Kerio Winroute Firewall with the Content Filter option. Very easy to setup and configure, and uses the best filter IMO. But expect to pay, Firewall is $499, and the content filter add-on is $249, add this together plus the cost of a small pc. Also keep in mind that the filter will have to be renewed yearly at about $149/yr. Another cool feature you can add on is McAfee AV scanning all network traffic.
Locked it inside a cabinet along with the cable modem. (be sure it is a low power PC, Sempron or Celeron that can tolerate the lack of ventilation, it only needs 256MB ram and the lowest powered low-end cpu you can find. The new run-cool WD HDDS are a plus here too. This prevents bypassing the firewall by physically connecting the pc to the cable modem.
Set the filter to block:
Erotic/Sex
Pornography
Extreme or whatever else you want. Since it is a corporate firewall, there are dozens of other categories to block.
Turn on all http logging and share the log folder as read only so everyone in the family has access to the logs.
Trained mom and dad what to look for in the logs, and also showed it to their kids. Kids knowing that anyone can see what pages they have been to keeps them from searching for 'naughty' things.
Even with all of these settings, I would say it is only 80% effective at blocking porn. But the logs are untouchable, revealing, and can be viewed by anyone in the family.
Granted most teens will find a way around this, such as finding an open WiFi in their neighborhood, or goto their friends house. But at least it is was a way for parents to control their own internet.
I don't 100% agree with this, when I was a teen I enjoyed privacy and trust from my parents. My parents talked with me about these things and we had a mutual trust. No filter on the planet will replace good parenting IMO. But I can see the need for such measures in some situations, but that can be debated forever as well.
If you are in the Phoenix area, I doubt you will run into any real problems. Cox has much more bandwidth capacity here than they advertise because of all that fiber they ran in the early 90s. When it is profitable for them to do so, they will increase it before they degrade it. I'm sure some of the geeks over there are already testing DOCSIS 3.0 in Paradise Valley somewhere. They seem to get the good stuff first.
After signing in, it reverts back to http://mail.google.com/mail at which point I add the 's' to the http to go secure mode.
If I leave my browser window open, sign out, and sign back in, it remains secure. But after closing and reopening the browser the same as I mentioned above happens.
The funny thing is, gmail offers the ability to sign-in securely, but not an option to keep it SSL throughout the entire session. It works when you manually change the http to https in the url after signed in, but there is still brief moment of unsecured traffic during this process.
But this is HDTV. It's got better resolution than the real world!
It just so happens that today I successfully 'Downgraded' Vista Home Basic that came pre-installed on an HP Pavilion pv9000 to Windows XP Media Center 2005.
Here was the scenario:
Vista kept crashing constantly when connected to a WPA protected wifi, but worked ok with WEP or no security.
No driver support for the existing (perfectly working) HP Photosmart 1215
No driver support for the existing (also perfectly working) HP Scanjet 5470c
I called 1-800-Microso and after getting lost in their phone menu I hit 0 and was connected to someone with a strange accent. I proceeded to tell the rep my intention of exchanging the Vista product key for MCE and that Vista absolutely doesn't work in the environment I need it to.
I wish I would have recorded the 35 minute conversation. It was like pulling teeth and many of his responses were laughable. But my persistence, and having the correct answers to his scripted questions to force his script into a loop many times got me what I wanted. For example, I was told that it was impossible to remove Vista from the laptop. I explained I knew what hard drives were and how to delete partitions. I was then told that my media could not successfully install on this laptop because the product key has already been used. I explained that is the reason for my call (this generated many loops). He seemed annoyed and asked me for the tiny numbers on inner ring of the CD, then to put in the disc to prove that it won't install (perhaps thinking that I wouldn't) I said it's booting the XP setup now. Should I install it? He says go ahead. He needed me to repeat every action and step during this process, I had to tell him what % the coping process was on constantly. But after wiping out my partition and getting the installation to the product information screen he read me off a new XP MCE 2005 key.
My suggestion to anyone that wants to try this, is keep your cool. Know that they are following a script and that you can easily put them in to loop and actually make them think. Stay within the bounds of the script until you achieve your result. You can get annoyed, but don't get angry.
Also, this particular laptop has the Conexant HD audio in which no XP driver is offered by HP (or Toshiba) I did find this post to a forum about a similar problem with a Toshiba very helpful.
It is interesting to report that XP MCE runs so much faster and reliably that Vista on this PC.
Well, I can touch my ear regardless of what you say.
There, problem solved.
A cheap 3.1MP consumer digital camera for under $100 can do 2048x1536.
Now, I agree the real purpose-built security cameras have their place in their 0.6MP glory, but having a 3-7MP camera snap a photo every time something moves could yield a whole heck of a lot more in detail. Might actually get the bad guys caught. Hook it up to a motion sensor, enable the flash, cue up some swanky techno mp3s, then let the burglars have a disco or rave while they rob your place. The more cheap camera's the better!
Do your cameras do this? And can I do it for less than $500 and yield twenty-seven 8 by 10 colored glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explainin' what each one was?
I would like to see some links, cause google isn't turning them up.
That is correct.
Not only will you gain more respect in the long run, you will have less to regret later on.
I am the IT guy for several small businesses in my area. On a few occasions I am asked to install software beyond what is licensed. I explain to them very politely but firmly that it is illegal to do so and that if I did, would they trust a criminal with their data? Works every time. On one occasion one client hired someone else to 'save money' but ended up costing them way more than they bargained for. So who did they trust when looking for someone to trust with their technology?
Reputation is always better than the quick buck.