Things That Make You Say "Hmmmm..."

Some things just don't make any sense, and this week brought a pair of them to me.

No sooner do I post my positive experience with my DVR, the Philips 3575, does it develop a weird issue. I'm watching a DVD while recording something to the hard drive, which I've accomplished before without incident. Suddenly, the disc stops playing, the recording stops, and I've got some weird, white screen up on my TV mentioning some type of system error. Not only that, but the machine is completely frozen, and I can't even get the disc out. I finally have to plug and unplug the machine to reset it, and while the disc responds then, I navigate over to the hard drive, and everything that I recorded previously isn't there! Clearly, a catastrophic hard drive failure has visited me. I then watch the rest of the disc on the Philips, realizing that it's probably toast.

After the film, I head on over to my desktop (thinking that it's a good thing to have a nice LCD display as I'll be watching more TV online without a DVR). When I turn it on, I notice that my monitor has a weird pattern of vertical lines completely across it. Yup, Windows starts, and it's not going away. No, it's not the dreaded safe mode of Windows with the limited color palette. I decide to do a little troubleshooting, as I try and compute via Braille. I plug the monitor from the graphics card into the desktop's on board graphics, but the pattern remains. I then try to plug the monitor into my notebook's video out, and the same lines sit there. I'm a little befuddled as this monitor has been bullet proof since I got it, and performed without a hiccup along the way. I wonder if it might be the VGA cable, but I futz with it and it doesn't seem to make any difference.

I start thinking if I'm having some weird household electrical issue, but I recall that the computer and monitor were both off, through a surge suppressor turned off at the time of the Philips difficulty.

The next day, I find my receipts, and start to get some help, as both are under warranty still. First to the Philips. I call their customer support, and they were refreshingly helpful. I confidently blurt out "My hard drive is dead." The tech guy asks what the machine did, and agrees I'm probably right, but asks me to try something first. We unplug the machine for a full minute, and plug it back in to do a system reset. The machine then is back to normal, and the content on the hard drive seems to be there, and playable. Could it really be that simple? The only residue I've noticed so far is that the blue hard drive recording light seems to have gone out, but it was too bright anyway, so I wouldn't RMA the machine just for that.

Now to the monitor. I go to the Acer support site, and I get approved for the send back. I decide to make sure that there's nothing I need off of my desktop, as it could be sans monitor for the next month, and I don't have a spare these days. As I do this, I'm surprised that the display is completely normal! I run the computer for over an hour, and the weird pattern of vertical lines doesn't return.

While I'm pleased as punch that both the Philips DVR, and the LCD monitor are back to their usual state of health, I'm simply at a loss to explain what might have happened. Is this one for the X-Files?

--Jonas

Update: Jan '08- The DVR continues to function fine. Here's what happened to the monitor.

Internet Issues

My regular readership will realize that it's a rare event when I don't get a post up on a Thursday evening. Here's the reason why, and it's not that the dog ate my homework...

I turned on my internet connection last night, and my desktop. My USB WiFi adapter connected to my router, but FireFox kept not connecting to the internet. I then tried MS Explorer with the same result. Clearly the problem must be with the WiFi adapter (as an aside, the Buffalo one has worked really well, but they stiffed me out of the $10 rebate claiming I didn't send the UPC even though I did, c'est la vie). After trying two others, including this one, I simply wasn't connecting to anything despite a reboot of the 'puter, WiFi router and modem more than once.

Ok, time for the next plan, and some network troubleshooting. I powered down my desktop, and fired up the notebook wondering if something had monkeyed with my settings. Again, I connected to the WiFi router, but couldn't load a page in two different browsers. When I looked at the router, the LED for internet was on, so I was starting to wonder if my WiFi router had gone haywire and need replacing, although I was able to detect its signal.

The next plan was to bring the notebook to the router, and plug directly into the Ethernet port, completely bypassing any wireless issues. Should work now- except it didn't. Ok, maybe the whole router is bad, and I plug directly into the modem taking the router out of the equation. When I send a request, I then notice that the modem light blinks red (normally it's green). Hmmm. That's a new color, and probably not a good one that everything is working fine.

I then think back to what happened in June, and wonder if the whole telephone line went down, and realize that I probably should have checked for a dial tone before getting so far down the troubleshooting tree. I also take a minute to check all the wires are still in place, which they were. Yup, I still have a dial tone on the phone, so that's not the problem. Guess I'll need some professional help.

Next, I pull last month's Verizon bill, and call the company. I'm immediately greeted with the "We're experiencing heavy volume" message so something is probably going on as we're after business hours. I work my way through the voice prompts, and when I'm asked what my problem is with my phone, I say "INTERNET" until the voice recognition kicks in. The robot then tells me that I should contact my ISP. Huh? Verizon is my ISP so I'm confused now. Wait a sec, they give me a new number to call that wasn't on my bill.

Calling the second number, I'm again told that they are experiencing heavy volume. Yeah, I bet if the internet is out. I'm then told that it's out for most of my entire area code, at least on the DSL service. I didn't get to speak to anyone to find out what was really going on, and when it would be fixed.

Curiously, I checked with a neighbor, and their Verizon Fios was working fine. I'm not sure if my DSL ever came on, as I called it a night, and accepted I was off the information superhighway. Could a whole county's DSL really go out all at once? Would I be better off on the newer fiber optic network: Fios? The conspiracy theorist might think that perhaps the phone company would do this to get at least some of us to switch to the higher priced offering, but as I've been generally satisfied with the DSL service for two years now, I'm not going that route quite yet.

Keeping this in perspective, I've been without electricity, heat, hot water, phone service and even any water for more than a few hours at various points in the last several years (thankfully not all at the same time), and the lack of internet is probably the least painful. It's probably in the same category as my cell phone outage which is annoying, and inconvenient, but not terrible or dangerous in the end. I just hope this doesn't turn into an unending saga. If I hadn't taken so many steps to diagnose the issue, I could have just read a book.

--Jonas

PS: I looked online to see if anyone had posted about this, but if the internet is down, that would definitely explain why "mum's the word" on this issue.

It's Getting Quiet Around Here....

This week, I was using my desktop, and I noticed that there was no audio when I went to play a file. I went on to check a few things. I first verified that the speakers were on, and the volume was cranked up. Next, I made sure they were plugged into the audio jack on the rear of the computer. Finding all in place, I then went into the onboard sound driver, for the integrated audio, and checked that it was set correctly. Now I started to scratch my head.

A few years back, the onboard audio of one of my desktops had spontaneously gone, and I never could get it to work again. So, I thought the same thing had happened again. My work around that time had been to use a PCI sound card and disable the onboard audio chip which wasn't working anyway. I was wondering if this might be the occasion to upgrade to a Creative X-Fi sound card, and what they were going for these days.

Hold onto that credit card. I decided to check on one more thing. I went into the Windows XP audio settings. For whatever unknown reason, something decided to mute the audio on my sound chip. Why? I'll never know. I had only turned the computer on that day, and only done some web surfing, and not even used any serious programs.

The proof of concept is that it hasn't happened previously, and so far (cross my fingers) it hasn't happened again. One more Windows "feature" that I could live without. If my onboard audio driver (Realtek) is handling things, then Windows should just butt out.

--Jonas