Laptop woes

So Dell have finally come to fix my laptop.  The delay was mine rather than theirs I suppose so I'm not complaining (though the level of diagnostics they wanted would have scared the pants of a non-technical user).  I picked up a (almost) half price 2408WFP which meant that it was actually usable but the whole machine has been getting steadily crappier.

To be honest, I thought I'd picked up a drive-by rootkit and that the random but frequent crashes of the NVidia driver / vista windows manager was as a result of that.  Audio too seemed to make things worse.  I could usually manage about 5-10 minutes of video replay before CPU peaked and stuck at 100% and the kernel nuked the display driver.

Lots of people hate Vista.  I like it.  It's a testament to it's robustness that these problems, while annoying do not result in blue screens or outright hangs.  And yeah, I realise that X11 has had a separate windows manager for about a bazillion years, but have you used it?  I do security stuff for a living for a large bank, so UAC and the privilege segmentation is a bonus as far as I'm concerned.  I had a couple of bits of hardware that didn't work any more, but really, a new scanner is beer money these days.

So anyway, Dell come and replace the motherboard and LCD - carefully transplanting the CPU and Nvidia Quadro chip from one board to another.  Net effect, working screen, and all the other problems seem to have mysteriously disappeared.

So the moral of the story is, it's easy to blame Windows, but in this case I think the hardware (I'd guess Northbridge, but it's only a guess) was flaky.

What else?

The task tomorrow is to try and remove the unnecessary bitmap resources that I think/hope are the cause of the ribbon-x issue.  Path selection for folks with data in non-standard locations is done and there will be a couple of additional fields in the summary crosstab.

Update

Thanks for the feedback so far. I moved house recently and have suffered the usual break in 21st century services so things have been a little quiet in updates and there have been other priorities.

The big red X
For those of you receiving the red X across the ribbon there's not much in the way of good news yet as I've not been able to replicate it. I've a hunch I know what it is (some large bit map resources) but really that's a total shot in the dark.

The error is occurring deep in a 3rd party library so there's not much to go on but I'll see what I can do.

Training Manager data in non-default locations
This one has been fixed up this evening. The next release will prompt you to specify the path to the database used by Suunto Training Manager. It will still automatically import any data it finds there but as each session is processed in sequence the number of sessions present shouldn't present a problem - as someone suggested might be the case. I guess we'll see...

Non-english data import problems
I've not really started looking at this yet but it's next on the list. It may be that I need to add a little more detail to the logs generated by the import routine for this one.

If you're one of the folks with non-English settings and getting import errors, a copy of the log file may be helpful.

I'll try and get the next version out for/over the weekend.

Thanks

Electronics

If anyone out there is a dab hand at electronics - powering LED's, timing etc, I'd appreciate a message. I'm just starting out trying to tie the realtime HR data to 'arty' things and could use a few pointers so that I don't electrocute myself :-)

Basically I want to flash an LED (one of those ultra-bright 700ma/1a ones) in time to HR data. The PC POD is supposed to be able to manage 3 sets of data so that's a future idea. I'm looking at CodeMercs stuff for control http://www.codemercs.com/index.php?id=141&L=1 but am trying to figure out the "meat and potatoes" as the expression goes.

Cheers

Moving

I've been moving house this week and don't have any real internet access until Tuesday (hopefully). It's fair to say that I'm somewhat underwhelmed by the whole 3G wireless experience. I'm not sure why everything in the UK is taking 3 weeks to setup at the moment - need a phone line, sure 3 weeks. Gas safety check, 3 weeks. Sky install? No problem. 3 weeks. That's three industries that could use some extra staff right there. I'm trying not to do the "In Australia..." comparison, but jeepers.... Ah well, we have driving sleet so pffff!

On to software stuff, I've been tracking the comments and emails and will see what I can do to resolve the problems reported so far.

If you're a user for which everything (within the scope of this release) is working fine for, I'd like to hear that too!

Cheers