Hardware

Returns / Warranty From Seagate

Paul Farrow — Tue, 06 May 2008 20:40:03 GMT

Well I sent back some drives in April 2007 and they say they never received them. Basically they were some old IDE drives that were just in warranty so I wasnt too bothered. Then this weekend May 2008 got an email saying they were sending me one of the drives repaired under warranty. The other they say they never received even though the drives were boxed together.

So let me get this right they took 13 months to repair and return one of the two drives I sent them, and lost the other. Must be a record !!!

Scythe Kama Connect 2

Paul Farrow — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 00:45:16 GMT

Ok bought the Scythe Kama Connect 2 device from Quiet PC yesterday. Took delivery and at the same time as ordering it bought a Samsung 500GB SATA 3Gb/s hard drive to connect to it. The reason for buying this little baby is that I hate opening cases everytime I want to configure a new drive.

Before buying looked everywhere, did my research to see if any compatability issues with SATA and didnt appear to be so bought it. Open it all up out of the box, nice little device plug in the Kama Connect 2 and power up my PC which is a shuttle running VISTA ultimate 64bit. Straight away doesnt recognise the drive !!! Scour the manual and finally find above the SATA diagram

"This product supports the reading/writing for S-ATA and S-ATA II devices, but not supporting the optional functions such as NCQ or 3Gbps"

great, looked back on the Quiet PC site to see if they had any mention of this none says supports SATA !!!

Next day got onto Quiet PC (Paul Lee) who were very helpful, got one out of the box and it worked for them so what was I doing wrong. Borrowed another drive off my client and still couldnt read that. Then thought about it a bit more and noticed there was no light on the power supply brick then looked at the two pin plug and the converter. Thought about it for a minute what an idiot I had only plugged the plug into the earth socket ie. vertical rather than horizontally into the converter. Switched it round and all worked as it should. The disclaimer above about the 3Gb/s is just that it cant get to those speeds due to limitations on USB 2.0, I just thought it meant didnt support them full stop.

It really is a good little tool to have. I fully recommend it and because Quiet PC were so understanding and helpful (as usual) I even recommend that you buy it from them

http://www.quietpc.com/gb-en-gbp/products/components/kama-connect2

Vista, Palm Treo 750v and Windows Mobile Center 6.1

Paul Farrow — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 18:02:49 GMT

Since upgrading to Vista have had a few problems syncing my Palm Treo 750v with the mobile center. Read lots of places that upgrading to Mobile Center 6.1 helped well I dont think thats really the problem, the problem seems to be that the (or at least mine) Treo seems to have a mind of its own and gets stuck doing things ie. the bluetooth sometimes doesnt connect as the mobile is busy this seems to be the same with the syncing one minute it syncs the other it doesnt.

I normally find that once I have soft rebooted (taken battery out) the mobile it works fine whether it be mobile sync center 6.1 or 6.0

I run Vista 64 bit here as well for the record, just waiting for Birdie Sync to be compatible with vista 64bit then all will be good as I tend to run a mixture of windows and linux, prefer not to use outlook and use thunderbird instead as it has better support for IMAP.

Trouble with that Pesky Mouse

Paul Farrow — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 22:19:11 GMT

Vista, A Microsoft Wireless Mouse And Intellipoint

Ok since I installed Vista Ultimate about 2 months ago my microsoft wireless optical mouse 2 and keyboard has behaved strangely. I run dual screens and when clicking from one screen to the other it would sometimes have to be a four or five times double click before it recongised that I wanted to change focus.

After much trawling and swearing found this knowlegebase article - 321122 from microsoft.

After I did the above it seemed to cure the majority of my problems although I must say its still a little twitchy sometimes but mostly it is fixed.

Quick Plug For FEL Communications and Nick Roast

Paul Farrow — Sun, 20 May 2007 21:31:08 GMT

Right was after some 3.5 mm socket savers for my media center and found FEL Communications in Sunbury. Think they are about the only people that do them as couldnt find anything like it else where on the net. Very nice chap and collected them personally from his house which incidently was down the same road my friend from Brooklands Technical College used to live - Adrian Turner.

Right so the website is http://www.felmicamps.co.uk.

Thanks again Nick

Accessing Vista with smbclient

Paul Farrow — Mon, 14 May 2007 17:24:40 GMT

Just bought a new machine and decided to put VISTA on it. Now biggest problem was accessing the shares via smbclient or Samba. Hunted high and low on the net couldnt find anything not specific for VISTA and smbclient.

I then looked for windows xp and smbclient and found a post about changing a registry entry. Up to this point I had tried everything everyone else was saying like enable file sharing, private sharing etc and couldnt get any of that too work at all.

Probably works via another vista machine but not from linux or my apple.

I upgraded samba to the latest version before doing this. I then added a registry entry in \HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE

\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System

called LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy which a hexadecimal value of 1 and bobs your uncle you should be able to access shares and admin shares such as C$ on the vista machine from smbclient or mounting it in the fstab.

Hope that helped you, it helped me no end as I was getting very frustrated about it. And samba is key to my machines here.

excluding a dependency via UP2Date

Paul Farrow — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 18:22:00 GMT

always wondered how to exclude from up2date finally got off my backside and looked into it...

for all you out there that dont know its up2date --update --exclude=<package name with dependency problem>

Just got into the VOIP world here....

Paul Farrow — Tue, 14 Jun 2005 17:31:00 GMT

Right this is the what I got up to on Saturday, Sunday and Monday.

Looked at vonage http://www.vonage.co.uk and asked them twice before launching into it if I could use my own hardware and both times yes and yes.

Bought my own hardware which is a Cisco ATA 186 £80 ish trade price. Then signed up for vonage and they then said oh no you cant use your own hardware as its chipped especially for their network !! I must say be afraid of this company all customer services in America and tech support is either India or America and its a real pain trying to ask them anything.

so ummed and arghed do I just get their router etc and thought no I would cancel it, luckily I did as after 14 days you have to pay to get off their subscription service.

So then found sipgate http://www.sipgate.co.uk and that was good especially as they have a 1/2p a minute plan but couldnt make any outgoing calls to the pstn network. Still ongoing with them as they are not sure its them yet, but something is funny. Just email support which isnt that hot.

So then looked up gradwell http://www.gradwell.co.uk and all worked out of the box first time no probs crystal clear but they charge 1.25p a minute and after initial 3 months its £4 a month which isnt too bad. But you can ring these guys up and talk over any support issues which is excellent.

Oh one other thing I couldnt get my old bt handset to work with the cisco kit so bought a new bt phone and that still didnt work so then as I knew our bang & olufsen worked bought another of them at £200 but it just needs a phone that has power on the line as the bt phones get their power from the analogue line, I think thats what the problem was.

And thats it, then your in the voip world

Taking Delivery Of A MAC Powerbook G4 15 inch

Paul Farrow — Thu, 02 Jun 2005 14:34:00 GMT

Took delivery of my new machine yesterday. Rather swiss, this is my first Mac, they tell me once you taste Mac you never go back !!

First thing I needed to do was to get it on my encrypted wireless network ugh oh !! Couldnt for the life of me get it on, I use a manual 128 bit key and have my passphrase in key 4, did a bit of reading and realised that the Mac only reads passphrases from KEY 1 so had to move my phrase into that on my existing wireless access points and yes it all works...

Other problem I had was that I couldnt get the Mac to see my shares on the windows 2003 domain controller. It could connect via ip address and share name but the file finder couldnt browse the list of shares. Tried for ages to get it going and at last seem to have cracked it. Basically having read a lot of articles on the subject on the web I realised that in my local policy I had the network client talk securely (if server agrees) disabled as some articles say so made that enabled and just disabled the always talk securely and enabled send smb passwords unencrypted and this appears to have fixed it although I not entirely too confident about that. But its all working now :) the linux, windows and mac boxes can all talk together and share files no probs. Can even pass files to my mac laptop which is just great.

Shuttle XPC-SK41G with XP2600+

Paul Farrow — Sat, 07 May 2005 12:44:00 GMT

Upgraded my little old Shuttle XPC-SK41G from an AMD Duron 1.3ghz to an XP 2600+ and couldnt get the speed up above 1150mhz after much digging about realised that the FSB is set to 100mhz by a jumper,

it is jumper JP2, you need to remove it and the FSB then runs at 133mhz and got a speed of 1536mhz out of the new chip. The jumper is located at the rear left, mine had a red jumper on it !!

Shame these old shuttles dont have 333mhz FSB then would get even more speed out of them ah well, when I completely upgrade the PC....