For years I’ve had fans in the back of the audio cabinet to keep my stereo stuff cool. Even modern equipment generates a lot of heat, esp the Receiver or any Amps you have.

When I got this audio cabinet about 8 years ago I put 3 fans in it. I got the best fans that I could find to reduce the hum that fans all make – Vantec Stealth 5″, and a Vantec Stealth 3″ for the center bay. There is a small transformer hooked up to the Aux power of the receiver so that the fans turn on whenever the receiver is on.

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I’m getting a new pair of hi-fi audio speakers.

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Some research on SysInterals.com has turned up XPerf, a performance tool written by Microsoft.

This tool records a number of kernel mode activities and then allows analysis in detail, esp of interrupts and Deferred Procedure Calls.

Using XPerf on the ailing laptop has shown that the culprit is acpi.sys.

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OpenOffice Base 2.4 running on Vista Ultimate [x86 or x64].

Dynamic reports fail with the data not matching the column headers. Static reports work.

Update: This is a known problem. The problem is that the name TITLE doesn’t work as a report column. This means that no column of a database table can be named TITLE if dynamic tables are used.

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When building a database of my DVD collection which includes BLOB images of png images of the covers, the database can be backed up, but it cannot be restored. This of course makes the backups useless. The images are 475×475 pixel PNG images.

UPDATE: Problem solved. Parameter max_allowed_packet is the packet size for requests. This defaults to 1M and needs to be larger to allow this restore to work. Setting the max_allowed_packet parameter to 10M allowed the restore to complete successfully.
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I just got a new Alienware m15x. Great machine. Very nice design. But I’m running into a couple of problems.

Update: 8 June 2008 9pm- I spoke too soon. The problem is back in spades. See section later in this post regarding use of SysInternals Process Explorer with more data on the problem.

Update: 8 June 2008 - The CPU Busy problem is not occurring for about the past 2 hours. The system was idle – but with the CPU busy for several hours today. There appears to be no reason for this change. It bears watching.

Update: 7 June 2008 – New information added on CPU Busy.
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The WindyWeather site is now up on Lunar Pages. After being with Godaddy for several years, the performance began to get slower and slower. It was taking literally minutes to post an article on Wordpress. After an hour with Godaddy support and no satisfaction for why performance was so bad, I looked for other hosting services. (more…)