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.

Wires, Wires, Everywhere

It still bothers me that computers equal wires, plain and simple. The more powerful the setup, and the more wires that are needed, in an exponential fashion. I've written about this before relating to speakers, but the amount of wiring is even more when we consider even a simple setup.

Why is this coming up now? I wanted to setup my notebook, my scanner, and my printer all in one place. Easy and simple enough, and hardly a power system. The DSL modem and the router are right there as well in the same location.

Next thing I know, I've got spaghetti, not marinara, but of wires. I put this on two surge protectors, one for the wireless gear, and the other for the computer and the peripherals. At least the notebook eliminates a need for separate wires for a display and speakers. Still, my three USB ports quickly filled with the scanner, printer and a wireless mouse. Next, four plugs went into the surge protector (notebook, printer, scanner for those that are counting, and I needed to plug in a desk lamp as well). Just when I thought it was good to go, I then realized that the laptop was so close to the router, that I really shouldn't go wireless, and yup, one more cable to connect to the built in ports on the wireless router. What a mess!

Ever notice that when they take pictures for magazines or catalogs, they always have a notebook, with no wires in the image? They clearly don't want to spoil the lines, but who can really do that for more than an hour or two until the battery runs out. While it looks ideal, it's just not realistic.

So... what to do. Well, I need all the wires as I'm not dumping my scanner or printer anytime soon. I'll pick up some "cable keepers" somewhere (probably the velcro kind), and at least manage the mess. I had hoped that those wireless USB hubs would have gotten more popular, but they seem to be stuck in the starting gate. Eventually, the Wireless USB standard may gain some traction, as Bluetooth promised to and mostly didn't. Perhaps I could consider putting the printer on a network, and running it remotely, but that would just spread out the problem, add more complexity, and just dilute out the wire problem rather than solve it.

I think in the final analysis, each and every device needs its own input of power and data. Unless they can combine the two into one cable, which is rather unlikely (except for a USB powered scanner like this), I think for the foreseeable future, this is in the category of "it is what it is."

--Jonas